Nov 5—9Performa Hub
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Performa Studio is conceived as a public, process-based program, placing emphasis on the creative research, experimentation, and learning, that occurs during the artistic process within a studio environment, to consider what it means to think with both mind and body.
Artists and choreographers Moriah Evans and Isabel Lewis have devised a program of open rehearsals, classes, participatory group work, and talks, uniting choreography, movement, somatic practices, sound, music, and discussion in a specially designed space by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro—housing an exploratory program that fosters collaboration with both participants and audiences, creating a community space for events of all kinds.
Each artist’s program considers what dance and movement can mean as a social, collaborative, political act, to consider the formation of individual movement and collective movement. Throughout the Performa Studio program, Evans and Lewis will address a series of fundamental questions: What does it mean to move as an individual and what does it mean to move as a group? What is the relationship between individual and collective consciousness? What differentiates vigorous collective movements from chaos? And what roles can structured choreographic movement, and seemingly chaotic, unstructured movement, play in creating societal change?
ALL PERFORMA STUDIO EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
Moriah Evans is an artist working in and on the form of dance—as an artifact, object and culture with its histories, protocols, default production mechanisms, modes of staging and viewing—and the capacity of the public to read dance. Evans approaches choreography as a social political project that means far more than arranging bodies and movement in space—it is an ideological pursuit capable of probing the intersections of embodiment, performance, and politics. Recent works: BANKing (Musik Installationen, Nuremberg, Germany); Remains Persist (Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, 2023; Performance Space New York, NY, 2022); REPOSE (Beach Sessions, NY, 2021); Be My Muse (Pace Live, NY, 2021; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, 2018); Configure (The Kitchen, NY, 2018). Evans initiated The Bureau for the Future of Choreography in 2011—a collective investigating participatory performances. Evans was Editorial Director, Editor-in-Chief, Managing Editor, Movement Research Performance Journal (2010-2022) and Dance & Process Co-Curator (The Kitchen, 2016-2023). Evans has been an adjunct Instructor professor at Cooper Union and regularly teaches dance and choreographic workshops internationally. She has been an artist-in-residence at Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, LMCC, Issue Project Room, and MoMA/PS1, among others. She is a fellow at Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School (2025/2026), a Hodder Fellow (2023/2024), Guggenheim Fellow (2022), FCA Individual Artist Awardee (2017).
Isabel Lewis (Berlin, born 1981 Dominican Republic), trained in dance and choreography, literary criticism, and philosophy, is an artist and choreographer whose work takes on many different formats: from lecture performances and workshops to listening sessions, publications and what she has named “hosted occasions.” She has created projects around open-source technology and dance improvisation, social dances as cultural storage systems, collaborative choreographic formats, future bodily techniques and ecological thinking, and rapping as embodied speech act.
Her works have been presented in the contexts of contemporary art, music, dance, and theater by the Archiv der Avantgarden (2024), Sophiensæle (2023), Biennale Son (2023), Dance First Think Later (2022), Ocean Space (2021), Kunsthalle Zürich (2020), Sharjah Biennial (2019), Roskilde Festival (2019), Berliner Festspiele-Gropius Bau (2018), Tate Modern (2017), Steirischer Herbst (2017), Dia Foundation (2016), Ming Contemporary Art Museum Shanghai (2016), and Tanz im August (2015) among others. Lewis is a professor at the Fine Art Academy in Leipzig leading the Class for Performative Arts since 2021. She is the artistic co-director of the Tanzquartier Wien: Open House for Dance and Performance Cultures.