![\"Moriah](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/AJ-Evans8_IanDouglas_courtesyDanspaceProject.jpg\")
<\/a>Moriah Evans’s Social Dance 9-12: Encounter<\/em>. (L to R): Irene Hultman, Rashaun Mitchell, Lydia Okrent, Lizzie Feidelson, and Benny Olk. Photo: Ian Douglas<\/p><\/div>\n Leaving St. Mark\u2019s Church after seeing Danspace Project\u2019s presentation of Moriah Evans\u2019s Social Dance 9-12: Encounter<\/em>, I had a surprising thought about the experience: \u201cThis is so non-interesting that it\u2019s interesting.\u201d Then I spent the bus trip home wondering what I meant by that.<\/p>\n Note that I didn\u2019t think the work was un<\/em>interesting. Clearly Evans, composer David Watson, lighting designer Kathy Kaufmann, co-visual designer Strauss Bourque-La France, \u201cdramaturgical advisor\u201d Caroline Spellenberg, and Evans\u2019s six very diverse performers have produced something that gets your attention and provokes thoughts about the process by which it was made. What I mean (or think I mean) has to do with how you experience its elements, especially in the work\u2019s first part.<\/p>\n The way the audience members are guided in sets us up for novelty. We don\u2019t enter through the church\u2019s front doors; instead we walk around to the rear entrance, climb a flight of chairs, enter the sanctuary via doors that open onto the balcony, descend another flight of stairs, and find seats\u2014mostly on the floor (a few elder citizens sit on the carpeted risers). The dance can be seen from four sides; that includes the altar platform where Watson mans laptops and other electronic equipment and Jeanann Dara plays violin or viola. While we wait, we can listen to the noisy overhead footsteps of the next arriving spectators.<\/p>\n The dancers are already in place, scattered around the border of the performance area and sitting very close to the spectators. At some point near the beginning, Rashaun Mitchell is close to my corner. He\u2019s wearing a half-black, half-white unitard, as are his fellow performers. And yes, he\u2019s pretty interesting; his eyes are sliding around in their sockets, angling for a view, while his head is moving in a contrary direction so that he\u2019s seldom facing head-on what he\u2019s glancing at. I can see Ir\u00e9ne Hultman\u2019s face too, but she\u2019s wearing eyeglasses, so her glances are less obvious.<\/p>\n Early on, Mitchell opens his mouth wide, presaging a variation on this opening sequence. Soon, the dancers make extreme facial experiments\u2014not ones indicating joy or sorrow, but, say, wrenching an open mouth sideways, squinting one eye, raising an eyebrow and wrinkling the nose (I\u2019m practicing as I write this). Occasionally one or more dancers will rise, walk to another side of the space, sit down, and continue her\/his oblique fragmentations of what we usually perceive as a smooth, composed face. The music begins with a low sound that, in time, works its way into surging. A soft tweeting and whistling enters.<\/p>\n Soon we get it. I can relish the fact that when Lydia Okrent is in my sightlines, her whole body twists and slumps and straightens up in order to power her facial acrobatics. Lizzie Feidelson, sitting beside her approaches the task with more restraint.<\/p>\n I can view one, maybe two others at a time, but the rest have their backs to me, and what I mostly see are the spectators\u2019 faces (rarely do they twitch in spontaneous sympathy, but some smile). I know what\u2019s going on; I can loosely predict the departure of one grimacer and the arrival of another, and I surmise what the other performers are doing. After a while, I find myself thinking, okay. Now what?<\/p>\n