About

Chris Evans is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist trained in music and dance. Her practice focuses on how we might cultivate listening, listening to the invisible, listening for the forgotten, listening to what silence holds, listening with our eyes, ears and bodies. Her work asks us to listen to the unknown, to let the unknown seep into our ears, every pore before we colonize it with our minds and our words. Using the tools of cello, improvisation, dance, literature and languages, research and collaboration, she aims to create moments of community that revere, challenge and lovingly hold our imaginations, stories, and bodies. She is the co-founder of Idora Park Project Space with Ernest Jolly, directs Reconstruction Study Project, and is a member of the House Full of Black Women collective directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang and Amara Tabor-Smith, and A Simple Collective founded by Rhiannon MacFadyen Evans. She was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Award for Outstanding Achievement in Music/Sound/Text in 2016 for work on Reconstruction Study 1A and received an Isadora Duncan Award for Outstanding Achievement in Music/Sound/Text in 2013. https://reconstructionstudy.net

Chris Evans was born in San Francisco and raised in Oakland, California. Her music training began in Oakland public schools and after a very long break resumed at San Francisco State while Chris was working on a Master’s in Comparative Literature. Her comp lit focus on the relationship between literature and music was the formalized beginning of her exploring the overlapping and blurring of lines between disciplines. This exploration moved from the theoretical to practice when Chris dropped out of her Comparative Literature PhD program and moved to France to study cello, chamber music and dance. Coming back to the Bay Area enabled her to deepen and expand her interdisciplinary exploration through studies with Roscoe Mitchell, Alex Kelly, Shelly Senter, Abigail Hosein, and Randee Paufve and collaborations with choreographers Byb Chanel Bibene, Sheena Johnson, Lizz Roman, musicians from WaterSaw, Ark of Bones, and Bandelion Dance Theater.

Link to CV