2021 another audience artist

Moriah Evans works on and through forms of dance and performance. Her choreographies navigate utopic/dystopic potentials within choreography/dance/body, often approaching dance as a fleshy, matriarchal form slipping between minimalism-excess. She initiated “The Bureau for the Future of Choreography,” a collective apparatus, to create research processes and practices to investigate participatory performances and systems of choreography in 2011. Evans is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. She was an artist-in-residence at Movement Research, The New Museum, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Issue Project Room, Studio Series at Νew York Live Arts, ImPulsTanz, MoMA/PS1, MANA Contemporary, Onassis AiR, MacDowell. She was editor-in-chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal 2013-2020, curatorial advisor for the Tanzkongress 2019, co-artistic direction and editor of 2019.tanzkongress.de/salons (2019), and co-curator of Dance and Process (The Kitchen 2016-present). Her choreographic work has been presented by The Kitchen, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, SculptureCenter, Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Pace Live Danspace Project, Issue Project Room, Movement Research at Judson Church, American Realness, FD-13 (Minneapolis), Kampnagel (Hamburg), Theatre de l’Usine (Geneva), CDC Atelier de Paris (Paris), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai).

Moriah Evans with Jamar Roberts & Lizzie Feidelson

At Black Hole Hollow, Moriah engaged the framework of another audience to inform her research with dancers Jamar Roberts and Lizzie Feidelson for her forthcoming piece Remains Persist. Remains Persist uses expansive ideas of embodiment to excavate internal, imperceptible, and at times immaterial remains. What exactly constitutes “remains” are primary research questions. They are: parts left over after others have been removed, used, or destroyed; historical, personal, or archeological relics; bodies within bodies; ruins (and more!). Listening to and unfurling the curious, meta-mixture of “remains” alters how we inhabit the world. In this sense, working with the land, where processes of decay, rot, regeneration and various histories of human entwinement with the land (some wholistic, some violent, some ambivalent) are evident all around, enabled them to extend their research to their entanglements with the remains of the land. Listening closely to what the body holds is essential to the practice of Remains Persist. During their intensive rehearsals and sunrise and sunset performances, they broadened this form of close listening to encompass the land and entanglements in ways that pushed the limits of the body and how they attended to human and non-human forces, energies and rhythms with their own agencies and drives operating through, on and around them. Remains Persist broadens performance to encompass the more-than-human and the multitudinous content beneath and within surfaces of self, society, and nature.

Image credit: Lydia Orkent