"Beth Graczyk: if SNL had a modern dance department she'd be handing out the hall passes."
- Holley Farmer, Bessie-award winner & dance artist, NYC, 2016
Desire Motor:
A solo performance project that will develop over the course of 4 years.
Graczyk will construct 12 entities in the form of performance, writing, and presentations that emerge out of the consideration of desire as a physiological and transformative body, observing its metabolic rates and effects as revealed in the sensual digestion of architecture, object, spatial configuration, weight, texture, and scenario.
The inaugural solo, Beast, unfolds as a series physical micro-worlds emerging and dissolving through a shifting imagined architecture of space. Fueled by a persistent and unwieldy desire to become, Beast churns through a multitude of actions that reveal both earnest failures and fleeting revelations on the carnal nature of wanting.
Performance Calendar:
2016 June 26 - 1st Annual Harrisburg Dance Festival, Harrisburg, PA
2016 June 19th - Show Down at Gibney Dance, New York, NY
2016 April 17 - Greenspace, Fertile Ground, Queens, NY
2016 April 16 - CPR, Spring Movement, Brooklyn, NY
2015 December 15 - Movement Research, Open Performance, New York, NY
Selected Writing & Source Material for Desire Motor:
From Ocatvio Paz - "Appearance Stripped Bare"
"The notes of the two Boxes, like Duchamp’s confessions, make it clear that the ceremony begins with the Bride and at her initiative. It is not in vain that she has a life-center. That vital center is the origin of the pulse-needle, which holds in equilibrium the sex cylinder, itself none other than the wasp. “At her base,” says the GreenBox, “the Bride is a tank of love gasoline or timid power.” The Bride’s autonomy, her sovereignty, is an attribute of her nature: “basically she is a motor, but before being amotor that transmits her timid power, she is this very timidpower.
The other name for this timid power is automobiline: love gasoline. Where does this gasoline come from? From the Bride herself – it is a secretion of the wasp. The Bride is a desiring motor that desires herself. Her essence, both in chemico-physicological and in the ontological meanings of the word, is desire. This essence is, at one and the same time, a lubricant and her being in itself. Her essence, her being, is desire, and this desire, which cannot be reduced to feelings although it originates in them, is but a desire for being."
….
"Desire is the common element, the source of both figures; rather, we might say that shots and “mirrorical drops” are only the projections of desire. A desire that never hits the mark. The Green Box says that “the coefficient of displacement” – that is to say the farther or closer each shot is to the target---“is nothing but a souvenir.” A strange, hermetic affirmation that, however, is not impossible to decipher: what we see is only a souvenir (vague, imprecise, unfaithful) of what it really is. Knowledge is remembrance. Amorous, desiring remembrance. A new appearance of Neoplatonism, voluntary or reflexive, in the Large Glass. True reality is elusive, not because it is changeable but because it lives in another sphere, in another dimension. We walk among shadows and illusions, and nothing that we see, touch, and think has real consistency. Between us and real reality intrudes the horizon—that horizon which is the limit of our gaze and which is none other than the Bride’s transparent garment. The horizon of our memory. Deceptive transparency, light trick of the Wilson-Lincoln prism: the object we see from this side is not the one we see from the other. However, the object is one and the same. To desire is to remember this object, to take aim at is image."
Photo credit: Effy Grey | Effyography
- Holley Farmer, Bessie-award winner & dance artist, NYC, 2016
Desire Motor:
A solo performance project that will develop over the course of 4 years.
Graczyk will construct 12 entities in the form of performance, writing, and presentations that emerge out of the consideration of desire as a physiological and transformative body, observing its metabolic rates and effects as revealed in the sensual digestion of architecture, object, spatial configuration, weight, texture, and scenario.
The inaugural solo, Beast, unfolds as a series physical micro-worlds emerging and dissolving through a shifting imagined architecture of space. Fueled by a persistent and unwieldy desire to become, Beast churns through a multitude of actions that reveal both earnest failures and fleeting revelations on the carnal nature of wanting.
Performance Calendar:
2016 June 26 - 1st Annual Harrisburg Dance Festival, Harrisburg, PA
2016 June 19th - Show Down at Gibney Dance, New York, NY
2016 April 17 - Greenspace, Fertile Ground, Queens, NY
2016 April 16 - CPR, Spring Movement, Brooklyn, NY
2015 December 15 - Movement Research, Open Performance, New York, NY
Selected Writing & Source Material for Desire Motor:
From Ocatvio Paz - "Appearance Stripped Bare"
"The notes of the two Boxes, like Duchamp’s confessions, make it clear that the ceremony begins with the Bride and at her initiative. It is not in vain that she has a life-center. That vital center is the origin of the pulse-needle, which holds in equilibrium the sex cylinder, itself none other than the wasp. “At her base,” says the GreenBox, “the Bride is a tank of love gasoline or timid power.” The Bride’s autonomy, her sovereignty, is an attribute of her nature: “basically she is a motor, but before being amotor that transmits her timid power, she is this very timidpower.
The other name for this timid power is automobiline: love gasoline. Where does this gasoline come from? From the Bride herself – it is a secretion of the wasp. The Bride is a desiring motor that desires herself. Her essence, both in chemico-physicological and in the ontological meanings of the word, is desire. This essence is, at one and the same time, a lubricant and her being in itself. Her essence, her being, is desire, and this desire, which cannot be reduced to feelings although it originates in them, is but a desire for being."
….
"Desire is the common element, the source of both figures; rather, we might say that shots and “mirrorical drops” are only the projections of desire. A desire that never hits the mark. The Green Box says that “the coefficient of displacement” – that is to say the farther or closer each shot is to the target---“is nothing but a souvenir.” A strange, hermetic affirmation that, however, is not impossible to decipher: what we see is only a souvenir (vague, imprecise, unfaithful) of what it really is. Knowledge is remembrance. Amorous, desiring remembrance. A new appearance of Neoplatonism, voluntary or reflexive, in the Large Glass. True reality is elusive, not because it is changeable but because it lives in another sphere, in another dimension. We walk among shadows and illusions, and nothing that we see, touch, and think has real consistency. Between us and real reality intrudes the horizon—that horizon which is the limit of our gaze and which is none other than the Bride’s transparent garment. The horizon of our memory. Deceptive transparency, light trick of the Wilson-Lincoln prism: the object we see from this side is not the one we see from the other. However, the object is one and the same. To desire is to remember this object, to take aim at is image."
Photo credit: Effy Grey | Effyography
