Moriah Evans: Remains Persist

The project title, “Remains Persist”, says it all. Remains persist. This is as much true about Athens as it is about the internal somatic mechanisms of my body, and I dare say the bodies of others. Our collective embodiment is plagued by past histories, anecdotes, stories, battles, loves, moments. Can we tap into this more intentionally and proactively – not just when the residues and ghostly traces of the past take hold of us?

Fragments are everywhere. They contain bits and pieces of information, and maybe even clues, to understanding. Sometime in 2020, at the height of the global Covid-19 pandemic, I became fascinated by an attempt to resign – resign to my self, my body, my flesh, my stuff. I did not know how to do that, and still do not know how to do it. But I now know how to try to do that – by “giving up and surrendering to what is there in the present moment,” or by “accepting something that is already present but invisibilized.” These are examples of some tasks that I refined while in Athens. A tenet of my research methodology was that in order to interrogate what remains and persists, what is always already there, we must resign first.

As an initial step during my time in Athens, I offered the “1x1 Resignation Study Clinic” at the Panathenaic Stadium (Kallimarmaro) to members of the Onassis AiR community. Subsequent to this, I worked with Sotiria Koutsopetrou, Despina Saina, and Anastasia Diavasti. I met Sotiria and Despina in the masterclass I taught as part of Onassis Dance Days. Anastasia was a fellow AiR colleague from the project “IT” and Movement I of the School of Infinite Rehearsals. We were a quartet of women, moving through the city of Athens, usually in the late morning hours. We would meet at a particular destination and then do a resignation study, then something akin to a dérive that would unfold from one location to the location of the next resignation study. “Resignation Studies” transpired all over the city, but we spent significant time at Muses Hill, first on the top, at the Philopappos monument, then further down the hill in various spots. We went to Ardittos Hill, next to the Panathenaic Stadium (Kallimarmaro), as well as to the top of Mount Lycabettus and down, eventually finding our way to some stairs in nearby Kolonaki. These movement studies functioned as a meditative intervention into public space – they evoked stares, remarks, wonder, joy, appreciation, and the ever present chagrin of cursory glances of the human in a state of going about their day within bustling Athens.

There were also many hours and days spent in the confines of the dance studio at Onassis Stegi, or at Onassis AiR in front of a computer screen, a projection, or in a book, as well as with the community of other Onassis AiR Fellows. The majority of my days contemplated fragments of the past in relation to embodied presence in the present day streets and hills of Athens. Athens as myth. Legend seems a site in which speculation about the past constitutes presence. Ancient, modern, and contemporary ruins function as a cartography of remains throughout the city – some fragments churned into mythic and historical narratives alongside others that are forgotten or quite socially difficult to reconcile. I left Athens inspired to continue doing this practice of Resignation Studies in various cities in which I find myself.

In my practice, more generally, there is always a desire to dance, and a desire to listen. While incorporating both the dance history and social discourse of any given context that my work is situated within, my choreographies interrogate preconceived notions of what dance does and how to do it. My choreographies are projects that do go beyond arranging bodies and movement in space; they are wide-ranging explorations of ideological beliefs – including feminist, sociological, and anthropological considerations. In recent years I have probed (in an attempt to defy) various hierarchies around embodiment by developing movement from the unseen – a dancer’s organs and guts (“Configure”, 2018); ingrained social behaviors (“REPOSE”, 2021); as well as emotional, somatic, and sensory systems (“Remains Persist”, 2022). I have prioritized the unseen internal impulses and habits that initiate movement in a dancer (or any individual really). And I believe that these singular states and drives can become techniques, a codified way to explore and embody anti-form energetics.

Dance is very often built from an indexical movement system available for musicality, energetic contours, varied rhythms and form. Dance is a structure. But so much of the logic of that structure can be lost on an audience. In such instances, the dance can become a singular “representational” thing, an act, rather than the hefty sum of its many parts. Rather than highlighting the body’s external display, I strive to make the philosophies and ideologies behind that rigor and technique visible through the dancer and dance. Every dance I make results in a collaboratively built system of embodiment and performance. I wish for my works to recalibrate methods of making, performing and consuming presence. I use choreography to scrutinize not just what dancing is, what the theater is, what the art apparatus is, but what dancing, theater, and the art apparatus might do as an ensemble of forces.