Eva Alt: Steps and Words

On February 13th, dance artist Eva Alt will debut Eva Alt: Steps and Words—a multimedia solo show written, danced, and directed by Alt—that incorporates spoken and written word, movement, and film, to paint a personal portrait of life as a dancer.
The work moves between performance, play, and lecture—and interweaves diary entries, personal confessions, works of dance, and even the process of creating the show as source material to tell a story of human and artistic potential, striving, and growing up.

Eva Alt: Steps and Words features additional choreography by Nicholas Palmquist and Kate Wallich, an excerpt from writer and dancer Toni Bentley’s Winter Season, an interview excerpt from the documentary In Balanchine’s Classroom (2021), a mime passed down personally from the late Jacques D’Amboise, and an homage to Balanchine’s Apollo.

Alt leverages the tools of the institutional dance world to examine the process of becoming a ballet dancer, the value of artistic failures, and the generational chain of transmission in dance—to present the standard boundaries of the classical ballet world—and a dancer’s place within and without it.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Eva Alt (b. 1994, Buffalo) is a dance artist based in New York City whose work spans choreography, performance, teaching, writing, and new media. Her work asks fundamental questions about the standard boundaries of the dance world, and challenges the way audiences perceive the career of a dancer. Eva received her training at the Boston Ballet School, performed with the Boston Ballet and BalletMet, with influential summers as an Apprentice with The Chautauqua Institution, and with Suzanne Farrell at the Kennedy Center. Alt then became one of the founding team members at beauty-industry disruptor, Glossier, where she led social media from the brand’s inception through 2020, and won two Webby Awards for Best Social.

Alt has been selected as a choreographer for the 2023 American Ballet Theater Incubator program (January 2023) where she will debut a new work. In 2021, she curated, produced, and choreographed How Beautiful Everything Is Before It Gets Its Name, a group dance show that explored the place in between rehearsal and performance. In 2020, Eva was a dance resident at Art Cake in Brooklyn, and she has performed as a solo artist at Storm King Arts Center and The East River Park Amphitheater. Since 2018 she has taught her own ballet class for all levels in downtown New York City, and developed a community around recreational dance for adults. Eva participated as an interviewee in the critically acclaimed documentary, In Balanchine’s Classroom (2021).