Rebecca Lowery

Cannot wait for this occasion of psyches and volitions coming together in care and inquiry. This and next weekend - go to moca.org to reserve your spots:

Moriah Evans’s Remains Persist uses performance as a site for social inquiry and surveillance. Using choreographic scores as prompts, the work explores how language and dance can make use of each other to consider blatant and latent information.

Individually and collectively, the performers attempt to access, name, expose, and recompose what this project has termed “remains.” Remains might include: historical and personal relics; fragments remaining after use or destruction; physiological residues of pleasures and traumas; fantasies, and more.

Performers utilize their varied remains and differences—informed by race, socio-economic background, sexuality, ideological beliefs, citizenship, verbal and physical fluencies, proclivities, and more—as energetic and generative resources. Remains Persist transforms these seemingly random and accumulated bodily histories into corporeal forces, movements, and utterances.

An ongoing rotation cycle of distinct roles and situations structures the performance. Its format references a research laboratory, medical clinic, courtroom trial, dance studio, reality TV show, or something else entirely. Sometimes, the performers assume the role of a biopolitical bureaucrat to interrogate another performer's matrilineal heritage with respect to class position. Other times, they are caring researchers who dig into the lived experiences of race, gender, or class to excavate mundane and profound content from their own and each other’s biographies. At times, they merely observe or simply resign. In other moments, they expel content and forge meaning between related and unrelated information. Regardless of the roles they occupy in any given instance, they are always examining and utilizing dance and embodiment.

Remains Persist strips away, accentuates, and reconfigures markers of identity, breaking down the everyday performance of subjectivity, and bringing forth an array of conversations within bodies, societies, and institutions.