Evan Knapp, Author
Where There is Movement by Evan Knapp
“Showing up in dress code mattered to them. They noticed my weekly follicle color-wheel adventures. One of the old-era teachers told me not to show up again until I had cut my bangs: “Yōø arr not ehh lop-sigh-did sheet’tzu. Ewé must’ be abille to ce owt ov boath ize.” The next morning I got to the studio early and sat in wait. She arrived and I stood. With a pair of dull scissors I’d found between a parked car and a curb, I grabbed my frontal mane and hacked at it, keeping my eyes locked with hers the entire time. They relieved me of my scholarship, but it was so worth it.”
eVAN AND i HAD A CONVERSATION. I WROTE A NICE ARTICLE BASED ON IT which can be read here. YOU ALL WANTED THE MESSY CONVERSATION.
well Buckle up, sally; here it is.
Evan Knapp worked in the live theatre for 30-something years, starting as a dancer finishing up as a producer. He’s taught classical and contemporary dance at private and public and performing arts high schools, colleges and universities, plus, he's choreographed concert and commercial work, 16 musicals, 1 opera and 2 indie films. He also delivered singing telegrams while riding a unicycle in a gorilla suit. His first published work, a short story titled "Minimum Wage Blues," came out in Portland Review, April 1990. Where There Is Movement is his second, hitting the self-published Amazonian shelves September 2019: a straight-up short-form gay memoir, also, a non-roman à clef adventure -- Evan names names, multiple times… nicknames too. After decades of moving around, living and working all over the country, he is back, happily home, in Portland.
Ignite
Simply an embrace of meta-spectrum color, of ignited dark ether matters, of non-placid plasma.
Suspended in the exact center, a pip in eternity, the middle in infinity.
A timeless mashing sphere inmost a vacuum-hollow, stitched by centrifuge needles, worked by seamless fingers.
Ever-mulching, colliding, a transfiguring race, a race-rounded moshing, chested, a compounding slip.
Slipping into the center where particular particulates form, and formality is silenced, sliced apart and scattered, to be then pulled taut, round the edge of the elipsed boundary for another, and then a next.
Forever creating together in new configurations, dimension and redemptions.
- Evan Knapp
Where There Is Movement is Available in Paperback and on Kindle Now
“A quiet bombshell. He slays with words. The writing is effervescent and unnerving and brave and honest, like Kafka and Bukowski and Russell Brand all wrapped up in his own singular style.” - Dierdre Timmons , Author - Brain Candy, Documentary Film Director - A Wink and a Smile
“Where There is Movement is a portrait of an artist as a young man. About leaving family, creating family, finding an artistic voice and carving out a place in the world, it’s bound to resonate with anyone who ever felt like they were on the outside looking in.” - Heather Wisner, Editor/Contributor - Dance Magazine, Oregon Arts Watch, SF Weekly
“Evan Knapp survived the Eighties: not the sunny Eighties of The Breakfast Club but the grittier, real ones. Think Gus Van Sant and Mala Noche. He puts words together that shouldn’t work together, but they do. Evan displays an empathy, humor, and self-awareness in the process of becoming: becoming a dancer, becoming an adult and becoming a man.” - James J. Berg , Editor - Isherwood on Writing
“Extraordinary in it’s frankness and poetry. Somehow, as I read, I felt simultaneously heartbroken and uplifted, tearful and joyful. His gift as a dancer is surpassed by his talent as a writer.” - Linda Goldman, Performing Arts Manager, Co-Owner, Harris Goldman Productions
Too edged-out for the citizens of little Corvallis, Oregon, Evan Knapp writes a note to change his life. “I won’t be home for dinner.” And he is gone, teenager, aspiring dancer and now runaway. He is bound for the ballet world of Portland with $15 dollars, nowhere to sleep and a support system of exactly him. On the fringes of Portland society, he finds a grungy flop house and seeks out the studios where he can practice his art. By day and evening, a prodigy dance student and lauded performer, by midnight a careening partaker of Portland’s deep underground scene, Evan flings himself head-first toward ballet luminescence or back alley extinction. Peopled with mods and Wave-os, prostitutes and punks, the beautiful broken and happy, squatting bohemians, Evan negotiates roiling seas of counter-culture culture and mainstream art world success. A career expanding and a psyche imploding, he stalks his missing pieces with grace and fury. Told with bare-naked truth and startling humor unique, Evan Knapp’s real-life descent into the darkest corners of the 1980s resounds far beyond the last page.