THE COMPANY

  • We first met in college. We were friends and we were eager to make things together. From this, Motlee Party emerged with an aim to establish a collective focused on long-term projects. In February of 2020 our first production took place, serving as the impetus for the collective and its prolonged work. In 2021, the company toured internationally for the first time and has since permeated European dance hubs by way of festivals and performance opportunities. Our first commissioned work premiered in March 2024 and is now being expanded into a live evening length production. With the company spread around the world, our ideas often emerge in bars, on sidewalks, and over long calls in the bath. And when we do come together, well… we make it happen somehow.

  • MOSHPIT is a class for movers of every discipline. The workshop acts as a moving think tank - focusing on the intricacies of imagery, force, and the versed physical body. The structure centers around a stream of movement that encourages the imagination to move with abandon. Incorporating repetition, sensation-based cues, and permission to be frustrated, movers will gradually immerse themselves in the mosh pit: an extreme rush of energy and cadence through movement.

    If you are interested in hosting a MOSHPIT workshop, please use the email below to get connected.

  • Avery Gerhardt (she/her) is an independent choreographer and freelance performer from Houston, Texas. She was born in Rockport, Maine, a former home to the Wabanaki Peoples, in 1997.

    Avery began her pre-professional training at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts and graduated from the Boston Conservatory. She also pursued studies at the Accademia dell’Arte in Italy and obtained a BFA in Contemporary Performance and Composition in May of 2020.

    Her long-term research project “loadbearing” (withstanding the weight carried by a structure), stimulates and situates itself in accordance with the ecofeminist movement. The project began in 2019 with Tshedzom Tingkhye and Talia Stern and serves as the basis for her ongoing project, “F.F.P.S.”

    Avery has created and directed three evening works; 1134: A Study on Loadbearing (2020), What's the Point (2018), and COCKEYED (2018). Original works How does it feel knowing you will remember my face for the rest of your life (2017) premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and Falling by the Wayside (2016) at MATCH Midtown Arts Center in Houston. Her solo Massa premiered in Italy in 2019 and was most recently presented for Krakòw Dance Festival and Platform 14 in Berlin. Avery is honored to include the acknowledgements of the arts community in awards such as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant (2021), the City of Boston’s Arts and Culture Opportunity Fund (2021), The Boston Foundation’s Next Steps for Boston Dance Grant (2022) and a Mass Cultural Council Fellowship (2022). She is currently based in Boston, where she continues to build a body of repertoire alongside her practice as performer, dramaturg, archivist, and writer.

  • I work in performance, multimedia creation, video, installation, writing; in layering these mediums and stretching their possibilities. I'm thinking around loadbearing, how the everyday is stored in our bodies... what we choose to let go of and when. I obsess over responsibility; over obligation, generosity, fault. I know a good jump rope when I see one. I wonder what it’s like to rebel in the ways I would like to. Maybe tomorrow. My body is political and so is yours. This much I know is true.