Dancer and artist taisha paggett uses movement transform spaces and engage cultural histories. Clockshop will host evereachmore, her upcoming two-day performance on The Bowtie Project, a post-industrial site along LA River. A collaboration between paggett and dance company WXPT, the first performance takes place on May 30 and is an act of solidarity and commentary about the continued violence against African-Americans and marginalized communities.

What is evereachmore?

I’m interested in the 20th Century Great Migration of African-Americans, not just in the ways in which it points to difficult questions of bodies and landscape and the shared labor of moving together, but the historical materials of that era, that point to actions of resistance. The wake and continued unfolding of violent acts against bodies on the margins (specifically referring to acts of police brutality) is another tier of context, one in which we’re all currently implicated.

evereachmore is a temporary moment in time and space created for a set of actions and transformations to occur between a group of movers and witnesses. There were many starting points: my need to move away from solo performance and a need for more and more models of solidarity, especially Black solidarity, and ever so, queer Black solidarity.
Through all of these references, the dance itself is one of bodies attempting to enact new economies of resistance and new sensations of time, space and togetherness.

When staging a performance, how does a space or site, such as The Bowtie, influence the choreography?

The space is often the first point of consideration in my work. It offers the first level of constraint from which movement gets organized. With rich sites like The Bowtie, I’m drawn to doing less, so that the space itself can speak and not be put in conflict with the moving body (or vice versa). Working with The Bowtie space has been a bit different because WXPT and I have been rehearsing at a different site (Elysian Park). The process of installing will deal with bringing together the logic of those two spaces.