Four Meditations on the Occasion of }[…/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^]{

I have been watching and absorbing Moriah Evans’s dances for more than a decade. As a companion to the premiere of }[…/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^]{ at the Walker Art Center, I offer four thought-sketches that emerge from my experiences of being with Evans’s recent work. My hope is that these words, sentences, and paragraphs—more provisional than deterministic—can breathe alongside and annotate the depth, density, and expanse of }[…/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^]{.

I. Dance / Death

In the June iteration of […/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^]﹡at The Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens, New York, the performers practice dying. At least, that’s how I interpreted their virtuosic stagings of bodily collapse. Kris Lee walks forward, gasps as if she might throw up, grabs her stomach as if possibly poisoned, keels over, and falls to the floor. Invisible forces have caused this sudden and temporary casualty. One by one, each of the remaining dancers—Cyril Baldy, Malcolm-x Betts, Varinia Canto Vila, Chloë Engel, and João dos Santos Martins—succumbs to the same mysterious contagion. It is as if a disease to which only the performers are susceptible has temporarily gutted their organs. These enactments of dying are at once cartoonish and indescribably sensorial, a kind of somatic slapstick. We are left wondering what has befallen this crew of seemingly functioning, agile, and good-looking people. Or, perhaps, such a line of questioning relies too heavily on narrative, too heavily on appearances. We might ask instead: Why has Evans staged this rehearsal for death and dying? What is occurring within the dancers as they twitch, sputter, burst, and fall? And what is happening within us as we observe this scene of simulated horror? The dancers’ internally driven and inscrutable actions invite the audience into a mode of reception and being-with that has less to do with visual capture and more to do with the transmission of unwieldy feelings.

Between each small dance-into-collapse (or, perhaps, each dance-into-small-death), something else occurs. An orange traffic cone, a steel pot, a tripod, pieces of scrap metal and rubber, a silver bowl, a broom, and other miscellaneous objects and parts become tools for a kind of drawing practice. The remaining dancers carefully arrange these things around each prone performer in a manner at once procedural, sculptural, and ritualistic. Their actions reveal a way of attending to one another. These makeshift outlines mark the energetic and material weight of each resting figure and transform the industrial-floor-turned-stage into an abstracted crime scene. A relay of combusting, collapsing, lying down, waiting, awakening, and returning to the group task ensues. Once the final tableau is achieved, the dancers—all but one now roused from their temporary slumber—begin making noise. They slap, scratch, drag, and clang the miscellaneous objects around the room. (Wake up, wake up!) The focused quiet of the theater gives way to the rattling sound of all that remains unseen. Noise as griieff? Noise asssss no n se nse /:; ; (( Noiiseasmusic no I see as violen$$333 n o I seee a€ sssseeee n s&^^*+ion.

﹡Note the slight difference in characters that distinguishes the title of The Chocolate Factory Theater performance from that of the Walker version.

II. Dance Undone

What if we encountered dance as not only an artistic discipline and social practice but also a mode of dis- and re-arranging the very coding of what it means to be human? In this regard, I see Evans as a researcher whose choreographic propositions have a stake in revising and remaking what Sylvia Wynter terms our “genres” or “modes of being human.” Evans’s practices yield a science of moving and feeling that unspools and disregards hierarchical divisions between the biological, social, and aesthetic dimensions of aliveness. In so doing, her work disrupts the presumption that dancing bodies are instruments of formal display. Refusing to accept that bodies, movement, or other conventional elements of dancing are inherently available common denominators or natural vehicles of expression, Evans subjects the conditions by which a body can be said to exist and to move to a series of conceptual and physical quests. For Evans, the body—as physical organism, social abstraction, and speculative mystery—is a generative conundrum.

“We are in a state of figuring out ourselves . . . for we cannot know what a body is.”

Within this process of figuring out what cannot be known, the dancers’ modes of un-knowing reign supreme. Yet, this is not a scene of de-skilling. Instead, the varied kinds of virtuosity that years of dancing and dance training produce is channeled toward indeterminate ends. The intelligence of sensation, affect, motion, feeling, intuition, and perception shared within and among Evans and her collaborators makes up the collective wisdom of her practice. In one of my favorite scenes from […/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^], trios of dancers entangle themselves with one another in pretzel-like wrestling holds. One dancer presses their open mouth onto the body part of another and lets out a scream. Sound penetrates the clothes, skin, flesh, and organs as the performers take turns absorbing each other’s wails. In these and other scenarios, the performers risk going inside themselves and each other; they risk the intermingling of dissociation and contact. They embrace the abyss of dancing without knowing in advance what dancing is or what it might do.

3. Dance Step

What lives in a dance step?

“Actions of steps meet the theories of what choreography and dance are. They’re within the social structures that we commit ourselves to and that we obey, whether we are aware of doing so or not.”

Over the arc of her choreographic practice, Evans has maintained a love-hate relationship with the dance step. In past works like Social Dance 1-8: Index (2015), Social Dance 9-12: Encounter (2015), and BASTARDS: We are all Illegitimate Children (2019), Evans fervently committed her process to the structural and expressive complexities of steps. Later, Evans deprioritized steps in favor of the movement that emerges from devised improvisational methodologies, such as “expulsion technique” and “organ work.” In the latter, dancers experiment with a somatic-speculative practice of, in the artist’s words, “initiating movement from deep inside their body’s internal organs.” Moving through a highly organized system of distinct modalities, including “vibration, drawing, rhythm, displacement, and electrocution,” organ work generates bodily actions that veer away from the visuality of form. Operating on the levels of sensation and affect, both doing and watching organ work can be a seriously destabilizing affair. In Remains Persist (2022), Evans layers these esoteric movement investigations within structures of interrogation that mirror social institutions of surveillance and control (think the clinic, the immigration office, or the school). The dancers might improvise micro-movements that emanate from their livers and kidneys one minute and perform the insidious task of a state bureaucrat in the next. Within the structure of Remains Persist, the body never achieves autonomy from the hierarchies and oppressions of social order. Although one may observe or experience a sense of release, ecstasy, or confession, these temporary catharses are inevitably folded back into the choreographic machine.

With […/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^], Evans appears to amalgamate the formalism of external steps with the haptics of internal sensations. In this work, the maneuvers of power are less obviously relegated to language systems. Instead, power flows through every step, every fidget, every gesture. In one striking moment of unison, the dancers repeat one distinct step again and again, counting as they go: “Ten bodies, eleven bodies, twelve bodies . . .” They execute a series of seemingly unending fouettés—meaning, “to whip the leg”— in unison. What lives in this dance step? What violences does its troubled militancy conjure and/or evade? Watching this sequence at The Chocolate Factory Theater in June, I began to consider a whole history of formalism within experimental dance. So often traditions of experimentalism coded by whiteness present the dancing body as an unmarked and available vessel for the execution of steps. As an antidote to this facade of neutrality, Evans’s work has often turned the performative veneer inside out. Laughing, fidgeting, crying, gesticulating, screaming—these bodily excesses counter the austere semblance of the self-possessed and obedient dancer. The colliding of controlled steps and uncontainable affect in […/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^] seems to foreground the question of social violence ways I had not yet experienced in Evans’s prior work. Can aesthetic experimentation ever be conducted at a distance from the forms of violence on which the order of the world relies? At the core of […/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^], Evans is both wrestling with and confronting this question.

IV. Language Vacuum / Dance Surplus

On a recent Friday morning in New York City, the cusp of summer turning into fall, Evans hosted a two-hour practice of sitting in silence in MoMA’s Atrium.﹡ This offering to the museum-going public proposed a gentle yet disciplined reprieve from language and other norms of museum behavior—the consumption of looking, the uprightness of verticality. A subtle group dance slowly took shape as an effect of removing language as the vehicle for communication and togetherness. Over the course of two hours, visitors came and went, joining the circle, lying down, falling asleep. Children rolled across the soft seating and onto the floor. Smiles, gestures, and glances skittered across the room. The silent circle was not explicitly a meditation, although one certainly could inhabit it as such. Instead, it was an invitation to linger with the unsayable, much like the title for Evans’s new work. Within a mega-institution rigorously structured with behavioral protocols, Evans had ever so slightly adjusted the terms of how to be and not be, what to do and not do. Over two hours, I found myself surrendering to time, an experience not unlike watching […/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^]. As the scheduled duration drew to a close, Evans had to leave the Atrium, but she encouraged us to continue. Keep going! What might happen if we continued not speaking and, as a result, dancing together in this way? What if? A stranger wrote me a note describing his experience. “How nice to lay down in the MoMA! Many ghosts! Funny too, how the circle became a slow passing but still show for others. I had forgotten that possibility.”

﹡This offering took place within the context of Sarah Michelson’s exhibition, nowhere. Evans previously facilitated this practice at Artist Summit, Mobile Academy, and the Tanzkongress. Evans’s choreographic work has always existed alongside grassroots infrastructural work in and on the field of dance and performance. This is but one example of how her practice consistently exceeds the theatrical frame and works its way into the wiring of institutional systems.