Beast, produced by Gibney Dance in NYC, April 21 & 22nd, 2017. Tix: HERE
Work Up 3.3: Beth Graczyk from Gibney Dance on Vimeo.
More video clips of Beast: Image Excerpts, Movement Excerpts
One of You Is Fake premieres at La MaMa Moves May 25th & 26th, 2017
One of You Is Fake Trailer from Beth Graczyk on Vimeo.
"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.
A series of physical micro-worlds emerge and dissolve in Graczyk's inaugural solo, BEAST. Humorous, absurd, and as unstable as a live wire, Graczyk guides us with peculiar and detailed logic through a seemingly empty room. Human interactions and objects become necessary partners in bringing forth the unseen as we follow Graczyk's journey of revelation, rejection and carnal need, vividly etched through the labor of her imagination. BEAST is the first solo for Graczyk's larger body of work: Desire Motor which embodies the dissonances arising between internal wants and external realities.
Desire Motor stems from time spent with the writings and thoughts of a myriad of voices including Duchamp, Proust, Wolf, Spinoza, and Kafka. Each voice offering unique textures in their writing and approaches that speak to a continuum of ways humans dislocate or blend their innate internal desires with an external reality. 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.
Performance Calendar for Beast:
2017 April 21 & 22 - Work Up 3.3, Gibney Dance, New York, New York
2017 January 21st - Corridor Festival, Seattle, WA
2016 November 17th - Guest Artist at University of Michigan's Dance Department, MI
2016 October 21st - Guest Artist at Peridance for Raja Kelly's class Solo Improvisation II, NYC
2016 June 26th- 1st Annual Harrisburg Dance Festival, Harrisburg, PA
2016 June 19th - Show Down at Gibney Dance, New York, NY
2016 April 17th - Greenspace, Fertile Ground, Queens, NY
2016 April 16th - CPR, Spring Movement, Brooklyn, NY
2015 December 15th - Movement Research, Open Performance, New York, NY
Selected Writing & Source Material for Desire Motor:
From Ocatvio Paz on Duchamp - "Appearance Stripped Bare"
"...her sovereignty, is a attribute of her nature: “basically she is a motor, but before being a motor that transmits her timid power, she is this very timidpower... 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."
….
"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...The horizon of our memory."
Beth Graczyk is a choreographer, a performer and a scientist. For the past 15 years, Graczyk has performed throughout the United States and internationally in Japan, Ecuador, France and India. Concurrently, she has contributed to 9 science publications in the field of cancer research, including a first author paper in Analytical Biochemistry. Graczyk co-directed the Seattle-based company Salt Horse (2008-2016) with Corrie Befort and Angelina Baldoz, where they generated 4 evening-length works, 4 commissions and toured nationally through SCUBA. In 2016, Graczyk started a new performance company with Befort, and premiered a new work, Rose Blue, in fall 2016 at Triskelion Arts in New York. In addition, Graczyk collaborates as a choreographer with Danish director Torben Ulrich and with composer/palliative care doctor Hope Wechkin. Through her collaborative work she has received funding from Artist Trust, 4 Culture, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, Washington State Arts Commission, and The National Endowment for the Arts. As a solo artist, Graczyk recently launched a project called Desire Motor, a series of 12 solos, of which her inaugural solo, Beast, was produced at Movement Research, CPR's Spring Movement Festival, Greenspace, and toured to the Harrisburg Dance Festival last June. Graczyk is a company member of the feath3r theory in NYC and has recently danced for Sara Shelton Mann & K.J. Holmes.
Photo credit: Effy Grey | Effyography, Video: Mikcas Castaneda, Video Editing: Beth Graczyk
Sound Score for Beast: Spare Death Icon (Jason E Anderson), 'Foreign Relaxation Technique', 2011
From Ocatvio Paz on Duchamp - "Appearance Stripped Bare"
"...her sovereignty, is a attribute of her nature: “basically she is a motor, but before being a motor that transmits her timid power, she is this very timidpower... 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."
….
"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...The horizon of our memory."
Beth Graczyk is a choreographer, a performer and a scientist. For the past 15 years, Graczyk has performed throughout the United States and internationally in Japan, Ecuador, France and India. Concurrently, she has contributed to 9 science publications in the field of cancer research, including a first author paper in Analytical Biochemistry. Graczyk co-directed the Seattle-based company Salt Horse (2008-2016) with Corrie Befort and Angelina Baldoz, where they generated 4 evening-length works, 4 commissions and toured nationally through SCUBA. In 2016, Graczyk started a new performance company with Befort, and premiered a new work, Rose Blue, in fall 2016 at Triskelion Arts in New York. In addition, Graczyk collaborates as a choreographer with Danish director Torben Ulrich and with composer/palliative care doctor Hope Wechkin. Through her collaborative work she has received funding from Artist Trust, 4 Culture, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, Washington State Arts Commission, and The National Endowment for the Arts. As a solo artist, Graczyk recently launched a project called Desire Motor, a series of 12 solos, of which her inaugural solo, Beast, was produced at Movement Research, CPR's Spring Movement Festival, Greenspace, and toured to the Harrisburg Dance Festival last June. Graczyk is a company member of the feath3r theory in NYC and has recently danced for Sara Shelton Mann & K.J. Holmes.
Photo credit: Effy Grey | Effyography, Video: Mikcas Castaneda, Video Editing: Beth Graczyk
Sound Score for Beast: Spare Death Icon (Jason E Anderson), 'Foreign Relaxation Technique', 2011
