Motion State Arts presents
JENNA RIEGEL
VARVARA
November 7, 2026 . 7:30pm
wilbury theatre group . providence, RI
Varvara is an evening-length solo dance performance choreographed and performed by Jenna Riegel. A response to the life and art of Varvara Stepanova, the piece weaves together Riegel's world with Stepanova’s through an interplay of what is real and what is imagined. One of the prominent Russian Constructivist artists, Stepanova’s mediums include textiles, visual poetry, and costume and scenic designs.
Konstantin Rudnitsky wrote, “The human body was perceived as a machine: man had to learn to control that machine. It was the theatre’s function to demonstrate the fine-tuning of the human ‘mechanisms.’” Varvara tests this Constructivist theory of theatre’s function by observing the body’s reaction to considering it as mechanized and efficient versus allowing it to be chaotic and unpredictable.
The work runs approximately 45 minutes and is performed in two parts with no intermission. Part one hones in on stylized bodily control, emphasizing the angular and geometric lines seen in Stepanova’s artwork through technical virtuosity and an industrialized movement vocabulary. Part two breaks free from the constraints of this kind of Meyerholdian view of the body and unleashes a wild, circular, and destabilized approach to the performance.
Motion State Arts is thrilled to present the only Rhode Island performance of this piece.
The creation of Varvara was supported in part by a grant from the Amherst College Faculty Research Award Program, as funded by The H. Axel Schupf '57 Fund for Intellectual Life. Varvara was funded in part by New England Foundation for the Arts’ New England Dance Fund, with generous support from the Aliad Fund at the Boston Foundation. Varvara was funded in part by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies.
and come take class WITH JENNA RIEGEL, November 8!
Wilbury Theatre Group, 475 Valley St, Providence
$20/class; Space limited, advance registration encouraged.
CLASS TITLE TBA
Description coming soon.
BIOGRAPHIES
Jenna Riegel (Choreographer/Performer), originally from Fairfield, Iowa, is a dance artist and movement educator. Jenna holds an M.F.A. in Dance Performance from the University of Iowa and a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Maharishi International University. During her eleven-year performing career in New York City, Jenna toured and performed nationally and internationally as a company member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, David Dorfman Dance, Alexandra Beller/Dances and Bill Young/Colleen Thomas & Company. She also danced with Daara Dance (choreographer Michel Kouakou), Carolyn Dorfman Dance Company, Shaneeka Harrell, Tania Isaac Dance and johannes weiland. She has been on faculty in the dance departments of Barnard College, The Juilliard School and Virginia Commonwealth University and at the American Dance Festival and the Bates Dance Festival. Jenna is currently an Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance at Amherst College.
Anna Adams Stark (Director) has been living and working in NYC as a dancer, performer, producer, and arts worker for nearly two decades. She has performed with artists such as Ivy Baldwin Dance, Walter Dundervill & iki nakagawa, Kim Brandt, Jenna Riegel, Laurie Berg, Bessie McDonough-Thayer, Levi Gonzalez, Tara Aisha Willis, and in Joan Jonas’ Mirror Piece I & II at MoMA. Anna has also built an extensive career as a production manager and stage manager working most recently with inDANCE/Hari Krishnan and Brooklyn Ballet. Anna was a founding producer of RoofTop Dance (2010-2013) and ROVE (2014), and produced two exhibitions of Jo Andres’ work in 2023 and 2024. Anna held key roles at Dance New Amsterdam (2009-2013) and Movement Research (2014-2023). Anna was raised in Normal, IL and received her BFA in Dance from the University of Iowa.
Kathy Couch (Lighting Designer) is an artist, educator, arts administrator/advocate, and Bessie Award-winning designer based in Northampton, MA. Working in mediums of light, space, collaboration, and improvisation, Couch creates visual landscapes for performance and installation with/in traditional and non-traditional spaces both nationally and internationally. She has recent and ongoing collaborations with Yanira Castro/a canary torsi, Adele Myers + Dancers, Scapegoat Garden/Deb Goffe, improvisation ensemble The Architects, and musician Batya Sobel. Her work has been seen at Danspace Project, the Chocolate Factory, New York Live Arts, EMPAC, the ICA in Boston, LaMaMa, the Prague Quadrennial, and the New Museum in New York City. Kathy is a founding and current board member of the Northampton Community Arts Trust. She received her MFA in Visual Arts at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and her BA from Amherst College where she eventually taught and mentored students for over 15 years. Kathy is currently Co-Director/Steward for the arts organization Available Potential Enterprises, Ltd. ( A.P.E.).
Alexander Davis (Stage Manager) is a Boston based performer, choreographer, visual artist, homosexual, and all around good time. Alex received his MFA in Dance from Smith College, where he was a teaching fellow from 2021-2023, and is now Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance at Dean College and Special Projects Coordinator at The School at Jacob's Pillow. His fiber art is represented by Childs Gallery, which he mentions only because the gallery asked him to. He is currently touring Gay Aesthetic: Based on a True Story, which premiered at American Dance Festival in 2025. He has had the privilege of working with many great artists over the years, but frankly hesitates to list them because he doesn't want anyone to feel left out, or to have the order in which they are listed be misconstrued as some sort of hierarchy of import or value. Most often though he can be found making duets with his collaborator Joy Davis as The Davis Sisters. For more information please feel free to text him at +1 603-801-2362.
Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko was a Russian and Soviet artist, sculptor, photographer, and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova. Rodchenko was one of the most versatile constructivist and productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He was a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or down below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: “One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same keyhole again and again.”
Varvara Fyodorovna Stepanova was born to a family of civil servants and in 1910, enrolled in the Kazan Art School, where she met her future husband and artistic collaborator Alexander Rodchenko. In 1913, she attended the workshop of Konstantin Yuon in Moscow. At the start of her career, she was predominantly interested in the convergence of genres, leading her to seek a “new quality” in painting by the merging of sound and image, achieved through the use of a type of visual, “transrational” poetry (zaum) focused on the acoustic dimension of words, which she made up and juxtaposed with elements of graphic design. Her works were exhibited as genuine pictures, much like some of Wassily Kandinsky’s similar experiments. She also designed and published several poetry books using a similar process, among them Rtny Khomle (1918). Working under the pseudonym “Varst” or “Agaraykh,” she was one of the founding members of Russian Constructivism, a movement that rejected art for the sake of art in favor of functional and practical art. In 1924, she became involved in creating new fabrics for the first Soviet printed cotton factory, designing structures and patterns to fit the function of the piece of clothing they were intended for. With a view towards standardization—a principle valued by Constructivists—she hoped to create ideal clothes for each trade.
Image: Derek Fowles