Making Practice Moves (2024)

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.”

The evening-length work premiered March 21-22, 2024, at PAGEANT in Brooklyn, NY. Making Practice Moves has also 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.

Choreography: Evvie Allison
Performance: Evvie Allison, Charles Gowin, Jade Manns, Kalliope Piersol

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.

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 (2015)

Dance Nun, a solo, premiered at Gibney, where it was commissioned for their inaugural Work Up series.