Exquisite Attention:
the practice of directing focus with absolute, intentional presence, enlivening how we perceive ourselves, one another, and the world around us.
Upcoming Work of Anna M. Maynard + Company
RED
RED, is an evening length ensemble work of improvisation and image making inspired by Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Sara Ahmed’s writing on orientation in Queer Phenomenology, and Susan Sgorbati’s research and practices in Emergent Improvisation.Working through contemplative composition and live improvisation, dancers and musicians build and dissolve scenes in real time, listening for what emerges between bodies, gestures, sound, and the changing attention of the room. Narrative gathers through image, tone, rhythm, proximity, and relationship as we explore the ways we move toward one another, lose our bearings, and find ourselves changed through contact.
Each performance becomes its own living world, intimate, apophatic, and alive.
RED is commissioned and produced as part of the inaugural Durham Fringe Festival.
November 1 + 2, 2026
The Fruit, Durham
Open rehearsals:
October 8 + 15
Barriskill Dance Theater, Durham
PRACTICE FORWARD
Fall 2026
Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw
I am curating this season of Practice Forward with Culture Mill, in collaboration with the Haw River Ballroom and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Practice Forward brings artistic and somatic practices into the work of strengthening community. Through movement, voice, witnessing, improvisation, and collective play, artists and community members are invited to practice how we feel, listen, respond, and make meaning together.
This season moves from individual embodiment into collective awareness, culminating in a community performance of The Oracle.
OCTOBER 8 : Group Shake
Group Shake is a collective, solo durational practice.
We come together to tend to our own bodies, in community. It offers a space for those interested in movement without touch or interaction with others. We shake and move to music over an extended period, focusing on shaking and rocking, allowing the body to move naturally—free from concerns about appearance, skill, or rhythm.
While it may resemble dancing, the true intention is to release tension and energy. This practice promotes circulation, supports the nervous system, enhances overall health, and fosters a sense of community. In this container the social pressure to engage or dance with others is removed from the culture of the practice, even discouraged. Shake is often done to a 1-2 hour curated playlist, with an orientation by one of the facilitators and supported by a vibey set of portable lights.
Group Shake is rooted in postmodern movement research and shaped by curiosity and togetherness and continues to live as an evolving practice derived from queer club dance and somatic investigation, inviting people to gather, move through duration, and return to the intelligence of the body. What happens when the rhythmic durational dancing found in queer club spaces is brought into an intentional and sober container? Inspired by the ways bodies move for extended periods in club environments, the practice centers repetitive shaking and rocking as pathways toward release, regulation, and embodied awareness. Participants move within their own sensory experience while remaining gently aware of the collective presence, allowing a shared atmosphere to emerge without the need for social exchange.
NOVEMBER 10 : Explorations in Mutuality
Explorations in Mutuality is an evening of movement research exploring attention, relationality, and collective improvisation. Through movement, witnessing, somatic and relational practices, we will cultivate exquisite attention to what is already here, sensing ourselves, one another, and the space between.
We will work with sensation, impulse, tone, tension, ease, uncertainty, connection, and distance as material for movement and inquiry. From this more inhabited sense of self, we can become curious about how we move toward and away from one another, how attention travels through a group, and how individual choices gather into larger patterns.
Practices draw from Emergent Improvisation, Authentic Relating, Focusing, Somatic Stress Release, the Wheel of Consent, Contact Improvisation, and other somatic and improvisational research. We will explore what forms of responsiveness, connection, and mutuality become possible when we listen closely to ourselves, each other, and the collective space we are making.
Facilitated by Anna M. Maynard, emily liptow and Tommy Noonan
November 24th: The Oracle Rehearsal
The rehearsal is a place to learn the structure of The Oracle and practice it together.
Participants are introduced to the form, develop familiarity with its rhythms and ways of listening, and contribute material, questions, and collective attention that will inform the final performance.
No performance experience is necessary, only a willingness to listen, move, and participate.
December TBD : The Oracle Community Performance
The season culminates in an evening gathering centered around an emergent performance of The Oracle.
There are two ways to participate.
People who have joined the Practice Forward series and attended the Oracle rehearsal can enter the performance as performers, drawing from the practices and collective research developed throughout the season.
Others are invited to come as audience members and witnesses, experiencing the performance as it emerges in real time.
Come however you see fit: participate in the larger arc of Practice Forward and step into the community improvised performance, or bring a friend and join us as an audience member, witnessing the collective making unfold.
EXPLROATIONS IN MUTUALITY
Fall 2026
Living Arts Collective
Explorations in Mutuality, created with my collaborator Emily Liptow and produced through the CI and Somatics program at Living Arts Collective, brings people into practices of attention, embodiment, relationality, and collective improvisation.
We are interested in how individual bodies remain distinct while becoming part of something shared.
The work asks us to notice what is happening in ourselves, what is happening between us, and what becomes possible when we stay with that information long enough to respond.
The practice includes sensation, impulse, attention, consent, relationship, uncertainty, listening, and collective improvisation.
It is another place where I am asking the same questions that live inside my performance work, but through direct shared practice.
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
My artistic practice is rooted in the study of attention, perception, and the relational nature of being. Working across dance, improvisation, photography, somatic research, and live performance, I investigate how we inhabit ourselves, orient toward one another, and participate in the continual emergence of the world around us.
At the center of my work is a practice I call Exquisite Attention, a quality of sustained, intentional presence that invites deeper listening to the body, the environment, and the subtle exchanges taking place between us. I am interested in what becomes perceptible when we attend closely, how attention shapes experience, and how our capacity to notice influences what becomes possible.
Improvisation serves as both my artistic methodology and a way of studying the living world. Through movement, image making, and contemplative composition, I explore the unfolding relationships between sensation, memory, gesture, rhythm, proximity, and space. I am drawn to the ways images surface and dissolve, how bodies organize themselves in relation, and how individual experience contributes to collective meaning.
My work is informed by somatic inquiry, phenomenology, emergent improvisation, and years of studying movement as a practice of perception. I am particularly interested in the relationship between our internal experience and the external world, and the ways our histories, desires, nervous systems, and patterns of attention influence how we meet each moment.
Through performance, teaching, and collaborative practice, I create spaces for people to investigate these questions together. I understand artistic practice as an ongoing cultivation of sensitivity, responsiveness, and relational awareness. It is an invitation to become curious about what is already happening, to participate in the act of becoming, and to discover what can emerge through the exquisite act of paying attention.
FUNDING + SUPPORT
Living Arts Collective
National Endowment of the Arts
The Durham Fringe Festival
Southwind Retreat Center
Barriskills Dance Theater
The Durham Fruit
Dance Project NC
Artist Residency
2026 Fall cohort of Artists in Residence with Dance Project/NC Dance Festival.
Residency showing:
January 30, 2027