MORIAH EVANS: REMAINS PERSIST to be Presented at Performance Space New York in December

Performance Space New York will present Moriah Evans: Remains Persist, a durational performance that explores and excavates the body's internal, imperceptible, and at times immaterial remains, December 10, 11, 17, 18 in the Keith Haring Theatre (150 1st Avenue, New York). Evans has developed a process for making dance that combines somatic practice with contemporary research from the humanities and sciences, reckoning with the way history is embodied. Remains that become choreographed might include: unresolved personal or social histories; epigenetic code or the scars of physical injuries; physiological residues of traumas and pleasures. The performers in Remains Persists each explore their own remains through a shared set of scores and interviews that prompt the audience to consider how language makes use of dance, how dance makes use of language, and what is revealed and concealed in the body's provocation to movement.

Remains Persist evolves throughout its duration. Between 1-2:30pm, the public is invited into a free Open School dance class facilitated by Evans and the performers. Then, between 3-7pm, Evans and collaborators create and enact a clinic where remains are investigated, researched, probed, exposed, expressed, shared-harnessing technologies of scientific experimentation and surveillance to treat the theater as a laboratory, with performers switching between distinct roles of researcher and performer/experiment participant/subject. Though the work is open and porous (late seating is permitted and the audience may enter and exit as they please) it is recommended that attendees spend as much time as possible in the space to enable experiential transformation. As Evans puts it, "the longer you stay, the closer you get to theater..

Contemporary epigeneticists argue that physical and psychological patterns as well as inherited forms of transgenerational memory are stored within the body. Remains Persist seeks to transform these seemingly random and accumulated bodily histories into corporeal forces, movements, and utterances. Rather than treating these remains as something to be expelled or repressed, the cast (Cyril Baldy, Malcolm-x Betts, Moriah Evans, Lizzie Feidelson, Kris Lee, João dos Santos Martins, Sarah Beth Percival, Varinia Canto Vila, and Anh Vo) use their differing remains (of racial identity, socio-economic background, sexuality, religious beliefs, and more) as energetic and generative resources. Without adding anything to the body, the work strips away, accentuates, and reconfigures various markers of identity, to break down the everyday performance of subjectivity, and bring forth fragmented and concealed realities within bodies and spaces.

Expanding a style and dance vocabulary Evans refers to as an "existential fidget"-jolting across the spectrum of passive, resistant, and resigned bodies to urgent, active bodies with extreme expression and articulation-Evans considers this work the culmination of past performances Be my Muse, Figuring, Configure, BASTARDS: We are all Illegitimate Children, aggregating decades of feminist embodiment and expanded choreographic research to incorporate a choreographic relation to larger social structures.

Remains Persist is part of Performance Space New York's Healing Series, a year-long reflection for the organization on the political potency of healing and the role performance plays in it, in the midst of what feels like a momentous shift in art-making to center modes and practices of care. The ideas in Remains Persist have become more urgent over the last three years, as the social systems of the supposedly democratic state within the USA have repeatedly, and endlessly, failed to support the lives of the humans that they are apparently set up to serve. Remains Persist explores the potential within us to re-script how bodies occupy themselves, the stage and the world. Evans says, "A proposition of what a remain could be is the attempt to fit the multiplicity of a being into modern constructions of self. And with that I'm claiming dance, or the body, as a site where people can heal."

In order to emphasize the theater as a container of social relations, Evans has collaborated with set designer and visual artist Doris Dziersk to conceive the work's stage and setting. The set, an elaborate conglomeration of risers, helps to accentuate the position of the audience as observer and participant and unites performers and audience in a shared practice-challenging and confounding positional hierarchies both within the frameworks of performance and larger society.

About Moriah Evans

Moriah Evans positions choreography as a speculative and social process. Drawing on somatic choreographic practices and feminist critiques of visuality, her work expands a relation to dance beyond the visible, towards the different ways of sensing ourselves and our relations to each other. Developing movement from the unseen, yet felt, worlds of a body's material and affective interior, Evans' projects question default hierarchies between flesh, body, self, and subject. Evans maintains a multi-pronged approach to her art practice; creating site-specific performances, theater-based productions, gallery and museum-based participatory installations, symposiums, theoretical texts, and curatorial projects. Recent works include: Rehearsals for Rehearsal (Public Art Fund, NY, 2022); RESTOS (Espacio Odeon, Bogota, Colombia, 2021) REPOSE (Beach Sessions, ΝY, 2021); Be my Muse (Pace Live, NY, 2021; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, 2018; FD-13, Minneapolis, 2017; Villa Empain, Brussels, 2016), BASTARDS: We are all Illegitimate Children (NYU Skirball, ΝY, 2019); Configure (The Kitchen, ΝY, 2018); Figuring (SculptureCenter, NY, 2018). She initiated The Bureau for the Future of Choreography (2011-ongoing)-a collective investigating participatory performance. She was Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal (2013-2020) and continues as Editorial Director, Tanzkongress Curatorial Advisor (2017-2019), Dance & Process Co-Curator (The Kitchen, 2016-ongoing). She has been a visiting professor in the Institute for Applied Theater Studies at the University of Giessen, Germany and teaches dance and choreographic workshops internationally. Evans has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell, 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. She is a FCA Individual Artist Awardee and 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. She has a BA in Art History & English, Wellesley College, and MA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from UCSD.

About the Performers

Cyril Baldy studied ballet in Paris at The Conservatoire National Supérieur. As a dancer he worked with the Jeune Ballet de France, Nederland Dans Theatre II, Nederland Dans Theatre I and Frankfurt Ballet before The Forsythe Company from 2005 to 2014. Since 2014, alongside teaching internationally, he primarily choreographs, teaches and stages William Forsythe's repertoire.

Malcolm-x Betts is a New York based visual and dance artist who believes that art is a transformative vehicle that brings people and communities together. His artistic work is rooted in investigating embodiment for liberation, Black imagination, and directly engaging with challenges placed on the physical body. Betts developed and presented work at La MaMa Umbria International in Spoleto, Italy. La Mama NYC, Gibney Dance Center, Movement Research at Judson Church, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Bronx Museum and Dixon Place. Betts was a 2018 Artist-in-Residence with Movement Research.

Lizzie Feidelson is a writer and performer. She has worked with Moriah Evans since 2015, performing at ISSUE Project Room, Danspace Project, SculptureCenter, and The Kitchen. Her essays and reporting have appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, among other places.

Kris Lee is a New York based dancer, performer and DJ. She received her BFA at University of the Arts in 2019. Kris has performed with nora chipaumire and So&So Orchestra/Or Schraiber. She had the pleasure of working as a company member of the Stephen Petronio Company from 2021-22, and is currently working with Moriah Evans.

João dos Santos Martins studied at Escola Superior de Dança (Lisbon), P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels), e.x.er.c.e (Montpellier) and the Institute for Applied Theater Studies (Giessen). His work is often developed through collaborative processes and questions concerning dance history, relations between practice and discourse, and paradoxes of the activity of dancing. He performs in works by Ana Rita Teodoro, Eszter Salamon, Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz, Jérôme Bel, Manuel Pelmuş, Rui Horta, among others. He is the founder and editor of Coreia, a semi-annual journal, and he founded the artist cooperative Parasita in 2014.

Sarah Beth Percival is a dance artist, devoted mother, and Pilates instructor currently residing in the high desert of New Mexico. She received her BFA from North Carolina School of the Arts, then attended P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, and was an Impulstanz DanceWEB Europe scholarship recipient. Sarah has danced with choreographers Moriah Evans, Heather Kravas, Maria Hassabi, Milka Djordjevich, Kota Yamazaki, and Malin Elgan.

Varinia Canto Vila is a dancer, choreographer and movement researcher working on the notion of extended choreography, the movement of the social body, and the relationship between law and movement. Canto Vila graduated from the Arts Conservatory of the Universidad de Chile in 1993 and from P.A.R.T.S in 1999. In 2014, she received an MA in Art & Politics from Goldsmiths University. She completed a postgraduate degree in a.pass (Advanced Performance And Scenography Studies) in 2017. Canto Vila collaborated with: Claire Croizé, Marcos Simoes, Mette Edvardsen, Thomas Steyaert, Raul Maia, Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods.

Anh Vo is a Vietnamese dancer, writer, teacher, and activist. They create dances and produce texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. They earned their degrees in Performance Studies from Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Currently based in Brooklyn, Anh is also developing a sustainable relationship to Hanoi, Vietnam.

About the Creative Team

Madeline Best (Lights) is a Lighting Designer, Performer, Mother and Director of Operations at the Chocolate Factory Theater. Madeline's design practice comes from an interest in the way light affects space and the way it feels. Recent projects have included Katy Pyle/Ballez, Heather Kravas, Ursula Eagly, Milka Djordjevich, efrian rozas, luciana achugar, Andrea Kleine, Anne-B Parson/Big Dance Theater, and more. Madeline studied at Bennington College.

Ian Douglas-Moore (Sound) is a musician and sound person. Performing solo and in small-group improvisational settings, his music uses guitar, electronic sounds, and field recordings to discover the resonant properties of acoustic spaces. He plays with David First's Western Enisphere ensemble and recently presented a sound installation at Shift, where he is Technical Director. Recent sound design work includes pieces by Annie Dorsen and Lauren Bakst.

Doris Dziersk (Scenography) is a visual artist from Leipzig, Germany. She designed stage sets and installations for Meg Stuart, Peter Kastenmüller, Matthaei & Konsorten, Enrico Stolzenburg, Gesine Danckwart, Doublelucky and others. In addition to the performative context, she develops spatial concepts for temporary gatherings such as "The New Infinity" (Berliner Festspiele) and the Tanzkongress 2019. In her installations she uses spatial and haptic approaches to deal with topics such as home, community, materiality and transformation.

Joshua Lubin-Levy (Dramaturgy) is a scholar, dramaturg, and curator. He is working on a monograph on the photography and performance work of Jack Smith. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal and Director of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University.

Lydia Okrent (Studio Manager and Performer) is an artist working in and around performance. As a performer, Lydia has worked with Vanessa Anspaugh, Malin Arnell, Lauren Bakst, Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Kim Brandt, Tess Dworman, Moriah Evans, MPA, Mariana Valencia, and at The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 as part of the Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts exhibition. Her writing has accompanied the work of artists Chris Domenick, Mary Manning, Gordon Hall, Ayano Elson, and Tony Bluestone.

About Performance Space New York

Over the last 40 years Performance Space has been propelling cultural, theoretical, and political discourse forward. Futurity and world-building connect the interdisciplinary works presented here-works that have dissolved the borders of performance art, dance, theater, music, visual art, poetry and prose, ritual, night life, food, film, and technology, shattering artistic and social norms alike.

Founded in 1980, Performance Space New York (formerly Performance Space 122) became a haven for many queer and radical voices shut out by a repressive, monocultural mainstream and conservative government whose neglect exacerbated the emerging AIDS epidemic's devastation. Carrying forward the multitudinous visions of these artists who wielded the political momentum of self-expression amidst the intensifying American culture wars, Performance Space is one of the birthplaces of contemporary performance as it is known today.

As the New York performing arts world has become increasingly institutionalized, and the shortcomings within our industry were further revealed during the ravages and transformations of 2020, our focus has been not just on presenting boundary-breaking work but on restructuring our own organization towards prioritizing equity and access. We seek to build deeper relationships with our artists and communities by creating new access points. Through community programs, annual town halls, guest-curated programs such as Octopus and First Mondays, we welcome the public to actively shape our future and help us hold ourselves accountable. Programs like the revived Open Movement and the new Open Room invite the community in and reclaim the institution as a rare indoor public space in the ever-more expensive East Village.

Our search for new models is an embrace of the unknown-and an acknowledgement of transformation as a process of continuous inquiry, imagination, response, and accountability. Mirroring the spirit of experimentation artists have brought to our spaces across four decades, we strive towards something which does not yet exist. We believe this focus on changing the conditions in which art is made is just as fundamental as the art itself, and only serves to make it more substantial.

02020, the year-long project during which a cohort of salaried artists were invited together with the staff and board to re-vision Performance Space, initiated this transformation, and itself rapidly reshaped to meet artists' and community members' needs amidst the early days of the pandemic and uprising for racial justice. 02020 was a new beginning for us, a sharp and needed turn back towards artists to help rethink the institution for the future.

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