A Person Shaped Thing
A new solo contemporary dance work by Trinity Maydon, exploring the fragile architecture of Self Perception/Presentation - the process of strategically concealing or revealing information in order to influence others and our own perceptions on ourselves. Even the person you believe yourself to be only exists for you.
We consciously select different versions of ourselves in different rooms. Each version is carefully calibrated. Each gesture considered. A quiet choreography of revealing and concealing.
Drawing on sociologist Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theories of human interaction, the work examines life as a performance: frontstage and backstage, audience and actor and the constant maintenance of expression control where we learn to play roles before we even realise we are performing them.
The attentive pupil performs attentiveness
until the performance consumes the listening.
In A Person Shaped Thing, identity is not something created, but selected — assembled from external influences, expectations, and the environments we move through. We shapeshift to fit the spaces we enter, adjusting the mask, refining the image, editing the self.
But the performance is exhausting.
What happens when the masks begin to slip?
What remains when the roles fall away?
As the work unfolds, the body becomes a site of tension — caught between authenticity and artifice, between who we are, who we think we are, and who we believe we should be. In the search to “fit into one’s own skin,” we risk becoming estranged from it entirely.
There is no singular, stable self.
At the crux, we are something harder to name —
An unidentifiable, faceless creature.
Blurring the boundaries between performer and performed
Does the performance ever really end?
Trinity Maydon is a contemporary dance artist originally from Ōtepoti and a graduate of the New Zealand School of Dance. Since graduating in 2024, she has been taking her first steps as a freelance artist, exploring and shaping her unique voice within the art form of dance.
Trinity has always been drawn to the ways in which we use our bodies to tell stories, how we can shape ourselves to physicalize our ideas and express them to the world. She is deeply interested in the lived experience of movement and the connection between mind and body, constantly exploring how embodiment can be a tool for both personal expression and collective storytelling.
Since graduating, Trinity has had the privilege of collaborating on two rave installations with Untitled Warehouse Project— 'Entry' and 'Omnia' (2025). She has also worked alongside Jeremy Beck, teaching throughout Dunedin and performing in Company Beck’s 'Commentary of Dreaming' as part of the 2025 Dunedin Arts Festival.
In 2026, Trinity was immersed in the Fringe Festival, performing in Lyndon Foley’s 'Our Dreaming Bodies' and was a choreographer in Wellington Community Ballet Theatre's 'Four Questions' with her piece 'Is Santa Claus Real'. She also performed as a guest artist at the Performance Arcade in 'Four Strings – Four Limbs' with Alex Cooper.
A Person Shaped Thing is Trinity’s first full-length work, and she is excited to be debuting it as part of this year’s festival.