As the ambassador of popping, that urban dance which disarticulates the body, Linda Hayford is also fond of mixing and intersecting it with other “upright” styles, such as locking and house. This is very visible in her career as a performer with the Paradox-Sal group, initiated by Ousmane Sy, and her position within the open-ended F.A.I.R.E. collective, which has been at the helm of the Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes since 2019. After her inaugural solo Shapeshifting, created in 2016, AlShe/Me  fully illustrates an artistic identity in perpetual evolution. Alongside her older brother Mike Hayford, the same man who introduced  her to popping, the choreographer explores the metamorphoses and physical transformations that take place, as influences play out,  between two close beings. Questioning their differences as well as their similarities, she confirms the power of an expressive, fluid dance. The  sensitivity of her gestures draws from the deepest levels, from the mysterious alchemy that gives the duet its title.

Source : programme du CND

Although Linda Hayford is best known as an  ambassador for popping, her dance practice has evolved through the  encounter between genres and moves. Above all a practitioner of upright  dance inspired by funk and its diverse aesthetics, she is driven by a  desire for versatility and a blend of styles that calls for team  battles, which brings her into contact with hype, of course popping, as  well as locking, the new style, and house. As part of the group  Paradox-sal, launched by Ousmane Sy, and the INsideOut dance company she  founded, the Rennes-based dancer and choreographer adopts an open-ended  and plural approach.

Taking a crossover of styles as her starting point, Linda Hayford  finds a common thread between multiple emotional and physical states and  focuses her aesthetic research on metamorphosis. Her inaugural solo Shapeshifting  materializes the power represented by the passage from one form to  another in an intimate fresco that deploys a succession of chimeras. In  the process of this quest for transformation, the switch-point or the  flipping point between forms and energies charts the course of action  sustained by the desire to get closer to the animal side of the body.

In AlShe/Me (2019, pronounced as “alchimie” in French,  meaning “chemistry”), Linda Hayford appears on stage alongside her older  brother, Mike Hayford. Years after having given her a leg up in the  world of popping, the dancer accompanies his sister in a duo that  focuses on the ephemeral character of the genre. Created in 2022, Recovering  invites 3 performers to reflect on the healing process following a  trauma through the transmission and appropriation of different tools  from Linda Hayford’s “Shifting Pop” vocabulary. 

For Linda Hayford, alteration has become an object of reflection on  the constantly changing nature of identity, where every stage embodies a  facet of humanity, culminating in the complexity of displacement.

Source: site du CCN de Rennes et de Bretagne

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Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).