Featuring live performance, facilitated dance parties, video, interactive text, and sculpture, Everything All The Time examines the passing of time through bodily practice and earthly concerns. Based in an improvisational performance practice Foley has developed over the past 6 years, the exhibition features curated and accumulated documents of daily dances performed over the same period and live performance as well as participatory events actively engaging with questions raised by the practice. What is the import and affect of daily improvisational practice? How can choreography and improvisation be simultaneous modes of making and being in the world?

Performance + event dates
November 4th 7pm performance (during Opening Reception)
November 6th 4pm performance
November 19th 5pm performance, followed by a performance by LA-based vocal artist Odeya Nini
December 2nd 8pm performance (during First Friday Reception)
December 16th 9pm embodiment dance party
December 18th 2pm performance (during Gallery Talk)

About the performance: the undergird (action is primary study #4)
Based in action is primary, the improvisational practice Foley has spent 6 years developing, the undergird began with the intention to build and perform a largely improvised speech – that is a dance and a spoken performance – about death and mortality. It has evolved into a real-time examination where the sensation inside the body meets and reflects upon the experience of grief, maternal lineage, birth, and how things begin. An intimate movement-based performance, the undergird mines the entwined loss and expansion of improvisation to speak to time passing through and on the experiential body and to look at the objectified, static idea of a (acceptable, recognizable) body of our culture. How can a speech be a dance? What does it feel like to speak to what’s immediate and hard to say? What language brings us closer to what is deeply known but difficult to name?

About the embodiment dance party:
Let’s have a dance party that invites you to occasionally, lightly, enjoyably bring your attention to your body as you’re dancing… not to change it but to feel it. You do you while we all think about respectively the crown of our heads, or of the space between your fingers, or your perineum, or….

What you can expect:
-An introduction and overview of the different aspects of our bodies we’ll be bringing attention to throughout the dance party
-A led warm up to become sensitive to subtle sensations and shifts on our bodies
-A full on 60 minute dance party where you can let loose as Foley suggests areas to think about and consider, while continuing to get your groove on.

This is a dance party. It is open to all and every body. Vox Populi is not a wheelchair accessible venue.

Meg Foley is a Philadelphia-based performer, choreographer, and director of moving parts, the name she ascribes to her various dance- and performance-based actions that explore the materiality of dance and physical identity as form. Her current research focuses on the nature and affect of ongoing improvisational practice and on improvisation and choreography as simultaneous practices of performance. Her work has been presented locally by the Philadelphia FringeArts Festival, Bowerbird, Thirdbird, and Icebox Project Space, and in New York City, Los Angeles, Canada, Germany, and Poland.

Her research has been supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, the Independence Foundation, and through a 2013 Stary Browar Cultural Exchange Residency (Poland). She is creative co-director of The Whole Shebang, an interdisciplinary arts space and studio in South Philadelphia that hosts workshops and classes and provides studio rental to artists at affordable rates.

movingpartsdance.org // thewholeshebangphilly.com // actionisprimary.com