Olivia Ancona

Native from Belgium with Cameroonian origins, Maya Balam Meyong is a dancer, creator, educator and what she envisions as a light gardener. She is the co-founder and artistic director of The Dancing Society, a movement-based art collective, and of an emerging international dance festival, the Perpetuum Mobile.

Maya graduated with a BFA in Dance from PSPBB/Paris 8 University and completed Rick Odum’s professional training and teaching programs under scholarship award. She further deepened her practice through extensive training at the Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham Schools in New York City. Alumna of the Springboard Dance Montreal and of the Jacob’s Pillow Contemporary Program, Maya is an awardee of the Oeuvre Foundation, the Vocatio Foundation as well as of Phil Collins’s Little Dreams Foundation. She holds a dual bachelor's degree in Law and Philosophy from Saint-Louis University, Belgium, where she explored the possible congruence between movement practice and theory in her thesis “Poetics of the Invisible. For a Dialogic Philosophy of Dance”.

Former member of the Akram Khan Company, Maya works with Giovanni Zazzera, Brian Ca, Sylvia Camarda, Honey Dijon, Alexis Blake, and Caterina Rago. She also (co)directs, performs, and collaborates on film projects with directors such as Jeroen Ceulebrouck (BE), Itai Zwecker (US), Stéphanie Paillet, and Nicolas Van Achter (BE).

While she embodies other artists' vision with grace and dedication, Maya crafts her own creative path between practice, performance, reflection and communal celebration. She weaves sensitive experience, imagination and poetry, with physicality and abstraction, nature and storytelling at the heart of her practice. Through choreographic pieces, films, and other hybrid ephemeral formats, Maya's work is an invitation to experience realms beyond the familiarity of words, logic or conventions as she believes there is infinite beauty to be found in artscapes that cannot be told as well as they can be perceived and that dance is an open door to those mystical spaces.