Intermissions: Moriah Evans

Moriah Evans, an artist and choreographer based in New York, creates innovative performances for a wide variety of contexts. Building on a series of projects that she has staged in different cities in recent years, Evans continues to explore how performance can offer different ways of sensing our bodies and our relationships to one another. Throughout her work, Evans approaches choreography as an expansive social process, drawing on wide-ranging somatic practices and feminist critiques of dance and visual culture, while seeking out the “knowledge our bodies hold.” She aims to heighten perception beyond the visual, embracing embodied forms of awareness and felt sense.

This winter, for an expanded edition of the Intermissions series, Evans spends two weeks at the Renaissance Society with a small ensemble of dancers. For this new project, Scrimmage, Evans stages a pattern of private rehearsals and public presentations that shifts during the span of her time in the gallery space. Each weekend, she offers a different format to visitors as she opens the doors to the public on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The first two performances (December 6th and 7th) will have an open-ended durational form, fluid and still evolving in real-time. The later performances (December 13th and 14th) offer a concentrated version, staged as a more bounded event. Visitors are encouraged to come multiple times and experience both formats.

Through her scored performance structures and a set of scenographic interventions created specifically for this space, Evans invites an active state of perception—grounded in one’s body and attuned to a larger milieu and social infrastructures—along with hints of reverie where things do and don’t make sense. In the vaulted gallery, she is composing with both material and immaterial ingredients: hanging scrims, enveloping sound, dancers in motion and in stillness, lines of sight, textures of light, and a public that stays or passes through. Dance, here, is both fleeting and visceral, evoking bodies at once fragile and forceful. Evans aims to create a setting for Scrimmage that has a related set of wavering qualities: heavy and light, monumental and ethereal. In doing so, she considers the frame and the format in tandem, the contents of her work and its container, the body and what’s beyond it.

Within her choreographic scores, often developed collaboratively with her dancers, Evans draws on a variety of movement patterns and methods from different contexts. In doing so, she assembles them as a series of floating signifiers or somatic catalysts rather than explicit references. At times, the dancers work together or move apart, drawing out different internal and external states of being, variously individual and collective. Evans foregrounds the ways dance can create different kinds of sociality between people, running interference in the ways our relationships and social connections are mediated through technology, learned behavior, and language. For her this involves recognizing the multiplicity of things that make up a person, complete with inevitable dissonance or incoherence. Scrimmage negotiates how we are always deep within our bodies and also beyond them, constantly feeling and perceiving, figuring out ourselves and others, being affected by micro and macro forces and affecting them in turn.

Curated by Karsten Lund.

Launched in 2017, Intermissions is an ongoing programming series devoted to performance and other inventive time- based works, staged in the Renaissance Society’s empty gallery in between exhibitions. This recurring platform features two artists every year, supporting a wide variety of live projects.

Renaissance Society programs are supported by the Teiger Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.