The Brooklyn Rail

“Be careful with giving Moriah a key to the space. She might just move in.”

A Performa producer said this to me half-jokingly, referring to Moriah Evans’s time-intensive and all-consuming rehearsal process. When Evans enters a space, she does not simply rehearse; she inhabits the architecture and its full spatial, temporal, and social dimensions. For Every Body Knows, presented as part of the Performa 2025 Biennial Studio section, Evans takes over the Performa Hub in SoHo: a vast storefront she transforms for two weeks into an immersive, open-door studio for dancing, watching, talking, debating, studying, and being together. The project unfolds non-stop from noon to 8 p.m. each day through movement classes, open rehearsals, structured conversations, and deliberately ambiguous “events,” destabilizing the boundaries between research and presentation, rehearsal and performance.

This kind of total inhabitation is typical of Evans’s process. When I danced in her previous project, Remains Persist (Performance Space New York, 2022), someone did give Evans a key to an empty apartment at 411 Kent Avenue in Williamsburg. And she did, in effect, move in. For six months, almost every day, we rehearsed there, unfurling a kind of parallel world. We laid down rolls of white marley flooring, transforming the domestic interior into a provisional dance studio. This architectural reorganization made tangible what Evans’s choreography pursued relentlessly: a dismantling and reassembling of structure at the level of flesh. The body, like the apartment, was treated as an existing architecture to be deconstructed and reorganized.

The studio we built out and inhabited was never just a place to rehearse, but a small-scale laboratory of a world where the body does not have to behave normally as a productive citizen but can, for example, isolate the liver as a paintbrush to “draw” in space. Still, those macro-sociopolitical systems of power were never entirely absent. Once, a neighbor called the police, alarmed by the guttural screaming sounds of our rehearsal. It was a brief but telling intrusion, a reminder of the normative orders of behavior that our collective practice constantly rubbed against.

Moments like that only sharpened the awareness of what was at stake inside the dance. To sustain that delicate yet powerful world of bodily logics required a quasi-religious dancerly commitment. The hours upon hours of rehearsal and repetition were less about perfecting movement vocabularies or mastering choreographic scores than about creating and maintaining the conditions for the dancing bodies to exist otherwise, simply as bodies in their absolute unruliness.

Here lies the dramaturgical problem of Remains Persist: how could choreography hold space for what the body knows, against the compulsive imperative to categorize, contain, and ultimately deaden that knowledge? The work formalized this tension as a collision between two entangled yet irreconcilable systems: the bureaucratic world that traps bodies within the scaffolding of signifiers—like class, race, gender, ability, citizenship, education background—and the world of dancing that lets them slip back into felt senses.

The participants of Remains Persist, myself included, improvisatorially interrogated one another, probing every contour of our identities with questions like: How does your body express gender today? Where does your class position live in the flesh? Simultaneously, we sank into a dancing logic that resisted such extraction. At times, the work resembled a surreal reality TV show, with serious yet absurdly entertaining lines of interrogation pressing us to articulate the truths of our bodies. Yet, beneath the spectacle pulsed something incommensurable and alive, a dancing activity that exceeds willful meaning making. If one world sought to define the body, the other allowed the body to become.

Throughout the process, Evans wrestled with how to compose the work in ways that could sustain that quieter world of dancing, bolstering its delicate resilience against the louder and more probing dimension of the piece. A similar question persists in Every Body Knows. Unlike the contained environment of a studio, which shelters the dancing activity, the Performa Hub is a public, high-visibility place teeming with competing rhythms: Performa staff working at their desks, tour groups passing through, spectators entering and exiting with varying degrees of attention.

I arrive one afternoon when a ballet class led by Cyril Baldy is underway. The structure of the class barely holds together. There are no mirrors; the floor is slightly slanted; columns in the center of the room double as makeshift barres. Around fifty bodies pack the space, sweating into the thick, humid air. Baldy’s authoritative voice cuts across the room as he shouts out counts and corrections. Meanwhile, performance artist Crackhead Barney, as a rebellious ballet student wearing very little clothing, hurls spontaneous cries and commentaries back at him, creating a counter-chorus of sorts that consolidates chaos into structure and releases structure back into play.

During the open rehearsal portion, speculative movement tasks, read aloud to the public, directs the dancers to explore how consciousness can be embodied. They begin with prayer-like unison movements, but they struggle to concentrate and stay together amid the clatter of the room. Against this backdrop of distraction later emerges a dense tapestry of improvisation: constant fidgeting, bodies scanning for the next impulse, fleeting bursts of clarity that unfolds into assertive gestures, frustration that hardens into stillness. Gradually, supported by Ian Douglas-Moore’s live sound installation, the weight of the movement begins to take hold. The chatter fades and the room’s attention recalibrates. Without any formal stage, the dancing quietly assumes the center.

But the more the dance takes hold, the more its exposure begins to ache. The openness of the process reveals its own brutality. The dancers’ exhaustion accumulates visibly with sweat-soaked clothes, labored breathing, and heavy gaits. Their persistence under constant exposure shifts visibility into a register of slow violence. I find myself both moved and uneasy, aware that my attention participates in the same economy the work exposes. The dance holds, but only at the cost of the dancers’ immense sacrifice. Here, violence is inseparable from vitality, each shaping the other’s force. To witness the dance is to stay inside that tension, to feel both the strain and the necessity of its endurance.