Performance
In perpetual blooming, despite the gods
Maya Oliva
- Dates
- Sunday 24 May, 17:00
- Duration
- 45 min.
In perpetual blooming, despite the gods is a study on the channeling of the energetic charge of an operatic prelude. A fascination with this vehicle and its potential: the moment before the word, in its germinal state, of blooming.
The performance is inspired by texts such as the first six missing pages of the Gospel according to Mary Magdalene, or the ancient poem The Thunder, Perfect Mind, where the unknown writer claims a being of multiplicities: being the silence and the loudness. Being the whore and the holy woman, the bride and the groom. Being “she, the lord” and, at the same time, the root of sin.
In the suspended temporal space of the performance, the dancer’s body becomes the conduit and container of a woman catapulted through time. Inhabiting the body of paradoxes, she arrives as a spirit, carrying within herself a lack of voice that is at once age-old and present. A vital force advancing through, continuously morphing, transforming, relentlessly blooming, despite adversity.
Maya Oliva
Maya Oliva is an Italian choreographer and dancer with family roots in southern Italy, Poland, Venezuela, and Canada. She was born in Montréal, grew up in Firenze, and has lived in Milano, New York, Brussels, and is currently hopping between Firenze and Helsinki. She has performed her work in Italy, Belgium, France, Finland, Iceland, Czechia and various
cities in India.
Influenced by her three-generation-long nomadic background, Maya explores belonging, the loss of home, and the unearthing of home through the flesh, the radical joy of dance, and the multilayered histories carried by the body. She has been focused on how dance can deeply
work with multitudes, thicken and inhabit the space between seeming opposites, and allow multilayered feelings, emotions, and states to burst, always in relationship to oneself and, through that, to other bodies.
Maya completed three years of studies at P.A.R.T.S. Brussels in 2016 and graduated with an MA in Choreography from the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2022.
Her work has received support from Centro Nazionale di Produzione Virgilio Sieni (IT), MigraMenti (IT), Finnish Cultural Foundation (FI), Arts Promotion Centre Taike (FI), and Goethe Institut (BE). Maya has also been selected for platforms dedicated to emerging choreographers, including NEU NOW - ELIA (Europe’s Emerging Artists), Danse Dense - Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (FR), and DNAppunti Coreografici (IT).
In 2017, she won the first prize for choreography at the Jarmila Jeřábková Award in Czechia with the duet Blue Gloom, created and performed with Tina Afiyan Breiova. In 2025, Maya was awarded the international DanceWEB scholarship for the ImpulsTanz Festival in Vienna.
Credits
- Choreographed and performed by
- Maya Oliva
- Music and sound design by
- Atte Elias Kantonen
- Costume by
- Meri Craig
- Production partners
- Centro Nazionale di Produzione della Danza Virgilio Sieni Firenze, MigraMenti, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Danse Dense Paris