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EVELYN
Four Bodies, One Life

Short Film

"Evelyn: Four Bodies, One Life" traces the development of an artist as they inhabit disparate times, spaces, bodies, and genders. Loosely inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the film is a spare, dreamlike künstlerroman, negotiating the tensions between youth and ambition, loss and longing, language and resistance. "Evelyn: Four Bodies, One Life" is the first production of Iunctura Arts, an art collective that brings together film, poetry, opera, dance, and was filmed at the historic Swannanoa Mansion on Afton Mountain, Virginia.

Film by EUGENE SIMONOV

Libretto by KONSTANTIN KULAKOV

Music and Performance by AZALEA and TOBY TWINING

Choreography and Performance by DARLA STANLEY and MAC TWINING

Sound engineering by GENE BOWLEN and JOEL DELGADO

"EVELYN: Four Bodies, One Life" - Teaser

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Eugene Simomov (he/him) is a Television Academy Award-winning filmmaker and producer based in NYC. For over fourteen years, he has produced numerous commercials, short documentaries, documentary TV shows, music videos, and other video projects. Born in Abinsk, Soviet Union, Simonov is animated by the power of visual language to transcend borders. In 2016, he received his MBA with a concentration in media business. He was honored with a student Emmy for the best unscripted mini-series at the 37th College Television Awards, presented by the Television Academy Foundation. He is a producer and director of "Excavating the Sky,” “Words of Hope” web series, and multiple episodes of the internationally aired Voice of America documentary, "Our American Story."

Konstantin Kulakov (he/they) is a poet and translator born in Zaoksky, Soviet Union. They are a recipient of the Greg Grummer Award judged by Brian Teare. His poems and translations appear in The Adroit Journal, Witness, Spillway, Harvard Journal of African American Policy, Tahoma Literary Review, and Loch Raven Review, among others. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University and are co-founding editor of Pocket Samovar magazine. He lives in Washington, D.C., on occupied Piscataway and Anacostan land.

Darla Stanley (she/her) choreographs for live performances and film, and often collaborates with interdisciplinary artists. She has presented her choreography internationally with support from The PEW Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe Festivals, Edinburgh Fringe, the Susan Hess Choreographers Project, and Arts Council of the Valley. Her performance credits include work with Leslie Dworkin, David Appel, Chris Burnside, Emily Berry, Keith Thompson, Aviva Geismar, Jenni Hong, ZeroMoving, Subcircle, Leah Stein, Melanie Stewart, and Siobhan Davies’ Philadelphia Bank Project. Darla currently teaches dance at James Madison University and has taught at Temple, Wesleyan, and Drexel universities and Queensborough Community College.

Azalea Twining (she/her) is a composer and vocalist. As a 2020-2021 fellow of the Luna Composition Lab at Kaufman Music Center, she studied composition with Ellen Reid and composed Under Her Voices for piano trio, which was the winner of the 2021 G. Schirmer for Luna Lab Prize. Azalea has continued to study composition and create pieces with a focus on singing her own work. Her most recent and current projects include “Echo” for solo flute commissioned by Intersection, The Red House for saxophone quartet commissioned by Second Stage and Composers Now, and a song cycle set to poetry by Dorothy Parker. Azalea has been studying voice with Eileen Clark since 2014 and is alumni of the WNO Opera Institute, Eastman Summer Classical Studies programs, and NYU MPAP Summer Classical Voice Intensive. She studies voice with Josephine Mongiardo-Cooper presently and is a member of the Columbia University early-music choral ensemble, Collegium Musicum. Azalea has premiered the work of Elizabeth Hoffman, Cecilia Olszewski, and other contemporary composers.

Toby Twining (he/him) - raised in Texas, with family roots in country-swing and gospel, Toby traveled musically from playing for rock and jazz bands to experimental music with a range of vocal techniques from Renaissance polyphony to western overtone singing. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1986 he moved to New York, initially writing for modern dance choreographers who wanted the sounds of a new choral music. In 1992 he founded the vocal quartet Toby Twining Music (SONY, Cantaloupe). Toby has received Guggenheim and Pew fellowships, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2013 Grants to Artists award, and a Barrymore award for the Wilma Theater’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. His current projects include songs and incidental music for Yvette Nolan’s The Birds, under the direction of Reneltta Arluk, and a commission from JACK string quartet. Toby is the Director of Music/Dance Accompanist at James Madison University’s School of Theatre and Dance.

Mac Twining (he/him) studied ballet with Nadege Hottier at the Premiere Division Ballet school and absorbed the influence of post modern dance from his mother, Darla Stanley. In New York, he has worked with choreographers such as Stephen Petronio, Tere O’Connor, Kimberly Bartosik, Christopher Williams, Paul Singh, Aileen Passloff, Esmé Boyce, Douglas Dunn, Ellen Cornfield, Liz Gerring, Elise Knudson, and more. Mac has also been fortunate to work with the Merce Cunningham Trust on many occasions, performing in reconstructions of iconic pieces like Sounddance, August Pace, Beachbirds, and Totem Ancestor. In January of 2023 he was recognized in Dance Magazine’s 25 to watch after his performance in Christopher Williams’s queer reimagining of Les Sylphides. In December of 2023, Mac joined the CCN-Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy, France.