Biography
BIOGRAPHY
Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş is a Turkish-American poet, choreographer, and filmmaker based in Northern California engaging with the disciplines of choreography and visual art as tools for grasping poetic language. Her work critically investigates how poetics can serve as a thread in understanding where the body belongs in the vastly changing ecosphere. She has served as resident artist at Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Stapleton School for the Performing Arts, SAFEhouse Arts, and The Center at Eagle Hill, and has been commissioned for World Stage Design (Canada), 92NY’s Future Dance Festival (New York), and FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival (San Francisco). Her dance films have received official selection from festivals including kNOwBOX Dance Film Festival (Texas, South Korea & Mexico), Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema (Colorado), and SzólóDuó International Dance Festival (Hungary). Her choreographic poetry platform, strikethrough-score.org, has been presented nationwide at Noori/TWIG Media Lab (Salt Lake City), Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art (New York), and Mark Foehringer Dance Project (San Francisco), and published with Poethesis Mag (UK), LOCULUS Collective (Massachusetts), and Pinky Thinker Press (New Jersey). She currently dances with MovingGround, covers the global dance scene for Dance Art Journal (UK), teaches with California Poets in the Schools and Gallery Route One Artists in the Schools, and directs the youth-modern company, BodyLanguage at Roco Dance.
Maxine received a B.F.A. in Dance (magna cum laude) from NYU Tisch and an M.A. in Dance Philosophy (with distinction) from University of Roehampton London as a US-UK Fulbright Finalist.
During her residency, Maxine collaborated with the local community over a series of workshops. Her workshop, Choreographic Writing, was an introduction to using poetry scores in the creation of movement. It consisted of a physical and written improvisatory warm-up using the language aesthetics of erasure poetry technique, a form of found poetry where pre-existing text is blacked out to form new sequences of text. In addition to the public workshop, she worked with Open Arms Dance Project and students at the Idaho Fine Arts Academy. Poems from these workshops were exhibited at Surel’s Place during First Friday and during the culminating performance installation, strikethrough 48, at The Common Well.
The installation culminated with a solo performance in response to “strikethrough 48,” an erasure poem about ending one’s life in a country flooding with natural beauty but drought-ridden when it comes to services for the mentally ill. Maxine collaborated with Taipei based animators Jade Lien & Irene Lin, whose “drawn-on-film” technique was projected at intervals throughout the evening, along with ambient sound by Salt Lake City based composer Michael Wall.
Gallery
