All performance are now SOLD OUT! In eight performances, January 22nd through February 1st, 2015, choreographer Moriah Evans premieres Social Dance 1-8: Index, commissioned as part of ISSUE Project Room's Artist-In-Residence program. Created especially for ISSUE's 22 Boerum Place theater, the work investigates a system of patterns that propel bodies through space and affective states. Social Dance 1-8: Index considers how we dance together, and build social relationships through choreographic pathways that are known and practiced in dancing and witnessing.
Featuring performers Maggie Cloud, Lizzie Feidelson, Benny Olk, Sarah Beth Percival and Jeremy Pheiffer; light design by Madeline Best, sound score by David Watson, and costumes by Alan Calpe and Christopher Crawford.
This will be the final performance in our 22 Boerum Place theater before our 18-month renovation period begins. Seating is extremely limited for all shows, advance tickets are required.
Social Dance 1-8: Index asks us to witness a dance as a means of sharing within the geometric architecture of ISSUE Project Room's historic McKim Mead and White-designed ballroom. Dancers travel along various trajectories in modes that imply unity, differentiation, competition, cooperation and partnership through the practice of dancing together within the theatrical paradigm of this particular location.
Social Dance 1-8: Index explores movement's constant states of relation through a choreographic system. A series of rules operate as momentary technologies for embodiment and codes of behavior. Body parts and positions, space and selves are examined through pattern and its variation. The simple yet intricate forms of Social Dance 1-8: Index ask: when does a dance / a dancer decimate choreography? When does a dance / a dancer ensure the regimen of choreographic structure? When does choreography decimate the possibility for the emergence of a dance or an individual personality? Personalities of the individual performers are sometimes showcased and sometimes muted through the adherence to and departure from the demands of the group. Embedded within the quest of abstract and expressive steps is a wish to reveal a portrait of a person in the act of dancing.
Social Dance 1-8: Index attempts to acknowledge the performance event as a site for a precious yet impermanent community gathering. A dance exists only in the present; all the while, it must contain the past, present and future. Can the structure and strategies of this choreography produce a means to read the creation of a dance, a community and the personalities of those performing and observing within it?
— Moriah Evans
Moriah Evans’ choreographic work has been presented at Danspace Project, the Kitchen, MoMA/PS1, Judson Church, AUNTS, American Realness, BAX, DNA, The New Museum, The Chocolate Factory, Dixon Place, CalIT2, Kamp Nagel and Theatre de l’Usine. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Performance Journal and has been involved with the publication since 2009. During her 2011-2013 residency at Movement Research, she initiated The Bureau for the Future of Choreography. In recent years, she has had the pleasure to work with Trajal Harrell, INPEX, Tino Sehgal, Sarah Michelson and Xavier Le Roy.
"Artforum Picks: Moriah Evans", Abraham Adams reviews in Artforum.
"Choreography is very rarely natural", Gia Kourlas interviews Moriah Evans in Time Out New York.
"Everyone Here is Part of the Act", Brian Schaefer previews Moriah Evans in The New York Times.
