Maida Withers Dance Construction Company

LEGACY

The TIMELINE and ARCHIVES present a comprehensive history of Maida Withers and the Dance Construction Company that highlights text, films, videos, and photographs of thought provoking stage works, improvisation performances, site projects,  along with media platform / events that reveal the Company’s extended reach and interest in experimentation, innovation, and  international engagement.  National and internationally recognized collaborators – dancers, composers/musicians, poets/writers, 3-D computer animators, visual artists, filmmakers, scientists, and technologists – are featured on the individual web pages for each work.

The concert bore her unmistakable stamp, a kind of aesthetic aroma compounded of equal parts wit, iconoclasm, and inventive curiosity.  What binds together Withers’ choreography is not stories, romance, sex, or sociology, but the sheer exhilaration and imaginative fallout of movement, movement interpreted in the widest and most liberated sense.
Alan M. Kriegsman, The Washington Post

Maida Withers Dance Construction Company, founded in 1974 in Washington, DC, is a vibrant artist-driven organization that mixes dance and performance with technology and media to create thought-provoking works for stage, site, and video in a collaborative process with artists, scientists and others committed to a process of experimentation.  The work is deeply immersive, human, bold, and moving – characterized by groundbreaking, inventive, stimulating ideas and technological innovation. Maida and the Company have been a major influence in the Nation’s Capital and abroad in exploratory experiments in improvisation, collaborative processes, works with a political/radical artistic presence, and art as a creative life force.
Through these decades Maida collaborated with celebrated artists Tania Fraga, Brazilian computer artist, John Driscoll, experimental sound artist, Steve Hilmy, electronic musician/composer, Rockne Krebs, early laser artist, Bob Boilen, Synclavier II composer/musician, Verabel Call Cluff and Linda Lewett, filmmakers, to name a few. Music is composed and performed live for Maida Withers choreography. Maida feels the presence of the musician is important during the performance to the public.

Current work features dance and technology and the interface with human emotional expression related to popular global culture and social issues. Interactive works driven by social and political consciousness have featured rotating loudspeakers, laser beams, wireless cameras, cyber worlds, video installations, video feedback, always with original music created and performed live. Maida is known for her daring in large scale projects involving innovative technologies (neuroscience, interactive visuals and dance, others).  Maida, Founder and Artistic Director of the Dance Construction Company,  has created a significant body of work, over 100 dances of breadth and vision. The Company tours internationally once or twice each year, often with support from the US Department of State and US Embassies.  Maida and the Company have engaged in residencies and performances in Russia (12 residencies/tours), Ukraine, Germany, Poland, France, Norway, The Netherlands, UK, Brazil (8 residencies/tours), Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Argentina, Croatia, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and others with performances at Lincoln Center GREAT DANCE in the Band shell (NYC), Luna Theatre (Moscow), Teatro Cacilda Becker (Rio de Janeiro), Warner Theatre, Kennedy Center, Lisner Auditorium (Washington, DC). Site works have been created for Lenin Museum (Krasnoyarsk, Russia), Museum of Image and Sound (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Holy Rood Cemetery, Corcoran Gallery of Art and Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, International Gallery, (Washington, DC), among others. Dance film shorts have been selected for showing at film festivals in Australia, Brazil, France, Canada, India, Germany, Washington, DC, Utah, North Carolina, (Amazing EarthFest), others.  The 40^th anniversary in 2014-15 celebrated the contribution of the dancers, visual artists, filmmakers, scientists and others who have contributed time and talent to invigorate and sustain the presence of Maida Withers Dance Construction Company’s artistic voice.