Linda Hayford

Although Linda Hayford is best known as an ambassador for popping, her dance practice has evolved through the encounter between genres and moves. Taking a crossover of styles as her starting point, Linda Hayford finds a common thread between multiple emotional and physical states and she 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 AlShe/Me (2019, pronounced “alchimie” in French, meaning “chemistry”), Linda Hayford appears on stage alongside her older brother Mike Hayford in a duo that focuses on the ephemeral character of the genre. Recovering invites three 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.

The Shifting Pop moves that Linda Hayford has developed since 2016 in Shapeshifting, AlShe/Me, and Recovering stem from popping, the funk dance technique of which she is a specialist. At once postural language and specific technical tool, Shifting Pop manifests itself in isolations and positions. It is designed to be embodied and delivered with organic conscience. Linda Hayford will be sharing the principles of the vocabulary in this workshop for Camping.