Madison Palffy is a dance-maker, performer, and visual artist based in western Massachusetts. She holds an MFA in Dance and Choreography with an emphasis in Somatics and Improvisation from University of Colorado, Boulder. Her work has been shown at Studio 303 (Montreal), The Iron Factory (Philadelphia), Ponderosa (Germany), The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought (Northampton, MA), GreenSpace (NYC), AS220 (Providence, RI), The Dairy Arts Center (Boulder, CO), and throughout New England. As a performer, Madison has had the pleasure of performing in work by Anya Cloud, Chris Aiken, Angie Hauser, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Paul Matteson, Wendy Woodson, and Lailye Weidman (among others). Madison is a founding member of LOCULUS, a dance and performance collective that creates performances in non-traditional spaces and produces an experimental dance journal. As an educator, Madison has taught dance and movement classes in a wide variety of settings such as workshops, weekly classes, and intensives to adult beginners, high school students, undergraduates, and professional dancers.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My work is driven by a sense of experimentation and artistic cross-pollination and insists that the body is inherently wild and strange. My process excavates the ways in which our bodies are not contained but enmeshed in materials, processes, and histories. I layer somatic inquiry and theoretical investigations in a generative dissonance that questions perception and disrupts the body/mind split. My engagement with (queer) theories and improvisational forms is at the heart of my artistic practice. In particular, I am interested in the idea of “dis-orientation”—how to disorient ourselves from normative ways of thinking and being in the world.
