ABOUT STEPHANIE EVANITSKY

Stephanie Evanitsky was born to Ukrainian parents in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh and began dancing at age five.  She came to New York as a student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.  Stephanie received her degree in fashion design from Pratt while also continuing her lifelong interests in dance, theater and performance, studying with Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis at the Henry Street Playhouse Dance Theatre Lab in New York City. She subsequently worked as an Assistant Professor of Dance at Staten Island Community College, NY and Director of Dance at Supernova Arts Center, NY.

“Miss Evanitsky… offers a new solution to the interrelationship of dance and sculpture which has obsessed many creators recently.” -John Percival, London Times

As an artist at Pratt, Stephanie started making drawings of dancers that floated in the air, drawing with an intuitive sense of the energy and proportions of the human form bending and twisting through space.  A friend suggested that as a dancer, she should try to actualize her art.  That idea began her choreographic vision.  Stephanie founded the Multigravitational Experiment Group in 1969 as artistic director, choreographer and dancer.  Her kinesthetic explorations necessitated an openness on the part of the dancers, as she had said, “to live in our moments of no absolute floor, letting go of our identity and resistance to change, to soar into our own unknown.”  Along with a few other dancers, she began exploring ways the body could move in 360º of space, working in partnership with one another and simple sculptural sets she designed, initially of suspended inner tube tires, vinyl tubes and sling-like swings. She developed aerial movement vocabularies and crafted choreography inspired by her passion for the relationship of movement and space.

“During 1969, after a lengthy period of drawing people in various states of motion and suspension in space, I became excited about exploring the kinetic possibilities of my own body in relation to the ‘extent and mystical steadfastness’ of gravity.  Essentially, I wanted to discover the… ‘bird in man,’ an internal feeling that seemed, at the time, deeply hidden but stirring.”
-Stephanie Evanitsky

Stephanie Evanitsky and the Multigravitational Aerodance Group received grants and awards from The Jerome Robbins Foundation, The Samuel Rubin Foundation, The New York State Council on the Arts, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Change Foundation and the Fylkingen Society of Stockholm. She received The Concert Artists Guild Choreographic Award, a choreographic fellowship from The American Dance Festival and was awarded a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship.

Stephanie retired from dance in 1979.  She moved to Long Island where she was able to turn her creative energies to the cultivation of a prodigious home garden.