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
November 1 + 2, 2026
The Fruit, Durham
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.
Performances:
November 1 + 2, 2026
The Fruit, Durham
Open rehearsals:
October 8 + 15
Barriskill Dance Theater, Durham
Practice Forward
Practice ForwardFall 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
A collective solo durational practice.
We come together to tend to our own bodies, in community. Participants shake and move to music over an extended period, allowing the body to move naturally and without concern for appearance, skill, or rhythm.
NOVEMBER 10 : Explorations in Mutuality
The community version of my ongoing research into attention, embodiment, relationality, and collective improvisation.
Through movement, witnessing, somatic and relational practices, we bring exquisite attention to what is already here, sensing ourselves, one another, and the space between. We explore what becomes possible when we move from a more inhabited sense of self into relationship with others and with the group as a living system.
The Oracle
An embodied community forum developed by Daniel J. Hayes and Queralt Jorba that uses movement, voice, witnessing, presence, and improvisation to explore what is present within a group.
The practice creates a semi structured space where personal and collective material can emerge through listening, movement, contribution, and collective attention. Pulling from Playback Theater, Zegg Forum, Theater of the Oppressed, Family Constellations, Emergent Improvisation and more
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.
Explorations 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 current work lives at the intersection of movement, somatics, improvisation, performance, and community practice.
The central inquiry is how we inhabit ourselves while remaining available to relationship.
I am interested in what happens when we come closer to ourselves and stay there. How we stay in relationship with our own bodies while also being available to other people, to the room, and to what is happening around us.
A lot of this work has come out of my own relationship to attention, belonging, care, and mutuality.
For a long time, I associated belonging with being needed, invited, useful, or understood. I became very good at reading a room, sensing other people, and extending myself very far into what was happening around me.
Eventually, I had to recognize that care cannot come from an empty, uninhabited body.
More broadly, mutuality asks for each person to be present enough to remain in contact with themselves while also being available to another.
A lot of my work now is concerned with what it means to come close to oneself and stay there. To notice when there has been some form of self abandonment, when attention has moved so far outward that sensation, desire, limits, or orientation become difficult to feel.
I often ask myself:
How close or far from myself am I today?
That question has become a way of returning. From there, more choice becomes available.
I am interested in mutuality as something that grows out of this capacity. The ability to remain connected to oneself while listening deeply to another person. To allow difference. To give and receive without disappearing. To move toward relationship with enough presence that reciprocity can actually emerge.
This has become one of the central questions underneath my work:
How do we inhabit ourselves fully enough to meet one another from somewhere real?
Artist Residency
Supported by my selection for the 2026 Fall cohort of Artists in Residence with Dance Project/NC Dance Festival.
Residency showing:
January 30, 2027