Madison Palffy

Madison Palffy is a performing artist, dance-maker, and movement educator 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 is driven by a sense of experimentation and artistic cross-pollination and has taken the form of films, installations, and evening length performances. 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 collaborating artist, she has had the pleasure of performing in work by Anya Cloud, Wendy Woodson, Lailye Weidman, Katie Martin, Chris Aiken, Angie Hauser, Kathleen Hermesdorf, and Paul Matteson (among others). Other collaborations include movement direction for Sleater Kinney’s music video “High in the Grass” and Petite Garcon’s east and west coast touring stage show.

Madison is a founding member and co-director of LOCULUS, a dance and performance collective that creates performances in non-traditional spaces, produces an experimental dance journal, and directs The Loculus Studio in Holyoke, MA. 

She currently teaches dance and Pilates at The School for Contemporary Dance & Thought, Berkshire Pulse, Loculus Studios, Ascendance, and Smith College. 

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 embraces multiplicity. 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. This idea of disorientation is taken both literally in terms of embodied practice and also theoretical in terms of the framing and structure of my work. As a maker, I work with processes. I am interested in building shared practices, languages, and histories– a culture is formed within each process and extends over time. One of my deepest pleasures in making is letting myself be surprised along the way.