Practice Moves Together showing at Movement Research at the Judson Church. Photo by Rachel Keane.
Making Practice Moves (premiering 2024; work-in-progress showing 2022)
Making Practice Moves, an ensemble work, sets Allison’s distinctive Practice Moves vocabulary within a semi-permeable performance structure that draws on social dance, lecture-demonstration, and the convention of the “open rehearsal.”
Making Practice Moves has been presented as a work-in-progress by Movement Research at the Judson Church and was developed with funding from New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grant and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. The evening-length work will premiere March 21-22 at Pageant in Brooklyn, NY.
Choreography: Evvie Allison
Performance: Evvie Allison, Charles Gowin, Jade Manns, Kalliope Piersol
Practice Moves showing at Movement Research at the Judson Church. Photo by Ian Douglas.
Practice Moves (2015-present)
Practice Moves is a flexible, iterative project organized around a vocabulary of invented steps and an array of methods for practicing them. Many of the steps are counterintuitive, guided by mutually exclusive directional force or traveling uncannily in static, tangled positions. They withhold; they don’t finish; they don’t rebound or follow through. Glitchy and insistently isometric, they are constantly renewing their effort. The vocabulary evolves continually with the practitioners; new steps may be invented or old ones may be removed from play to suit the dancer.
The dancers’ focus and approach emerge as primary materials when the steps are practiced in performance. Methods like Mental Practice foreground the dancers’ organization of their nervous systems as they visualize themselves completing repetitions while physically executing only the first tenth of a second of each step.
Practice Moves has been presented in New York City by Danspace Project (curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones for DraftWork), Movement Research at the Judson Church, and Center for Performance Research and by MCA Chicago. Support has been provided by residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, PLAYA, Tofte Lake Center, and Chez Bushwick, with funding from a Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Jerome Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Retreat in rehearsal. Pictured (from left): Jessie Ingalsbe, Lila Dodge, Jessica Ziegler, Rachel Maramba, and Evvie Allison. Photo by Elliot Emadian.
Retreat (2017)
Retreat is a durational study in prolonged rhythmic structures and the effect of proximity on an audience’s perception of time.
Showings have been presented in New York City at Center for Ballet and the Arts, where it was developed through a residency with the Next Festival of Emerging Artists, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, IL.
Choreography: Evvie Allison
Performance: Jason Collins, Sara Haarmann, Lindsay Harwell, Lauren Stucko (NY cast); Rachel Maramba, Jessie Ingalsbe, Jessica Ziegler, Lila Dodge (IL cast)
Sound: Original score by TJ Cole (NY showing); metronome (IL showing)
Picnic in rehearsal. Pictured (from left): Alexia Jasmene, Michael Turrentine, Robert Cornelius, Molly Brennan, and Malic White. Photo by Evvie Allison.
Picnic (2017)
This queered adaptation of the William Inge classic Picnic premiered at American Theatre Company in Chicago, IL, as part of the theater's Spring 2017 season.
From the Chicago Reader: “Now and then [Picnic] breaks into passages of dance (choreographed by Davis and Evvie Allison) that are not only articulate in expressing character but so appropriate to Hal and Madge that I was amazed, when I looked it up, to find no record of Picnic: The Ballet.”
Choreography: Evvie Allison and Will Davis
Director: Will Davis
Performance: Molly Brennan, Malic White, Robert Cornelius, Patricia Kane, Laura McKenzie, Michael Turrentine, Jose Nateras, Alexia Jasmene
Scenic design: Joe Schermoly
Lighting design: Rachel Levy
Costume design: Melissa Ng
Sound design: Miles Polaski
Video still from “Wind Up”. Pictured (clockwise from top-right): Jessica Cook, Laurel Atwell, Lora Faye Ashuvud, Rachel I. Berman, and Ayano Elson.
Wind Up (2016)
The “Wind Up” music video for Brooklyn-based band Arthur Moon premiered on NOWNESS, where it was featured on their landing page and in editor’s pick playlists.
Concept and choreography: Evvie Allison
Director: Sam B. Jones
Performance: Evvie Allison, Lora-Faye Ashuvud, Laurel Atwell, Rachel I. Berman, Jessica Cook, Ayano Elson
Music: Arthur Moon
Dance Nun in performance at Gibney. Photo by Alex Escalante.
Dance Nun (2015)
Dance Nun, a solo, premiered at Gibney, where it was commissioned for their inaugural Work Up series.