Hello! Welcome. You are welcome here. Everybody is welcome here. Stay awhile. Relax. Browse. Look at pictures. Read something that interests you. Watch a video. Click on things. How did you get here? I'm always so curious. If you are a fellow dancer, maker, or enthusiast, thanks for visiting. Leave me a message and I'd love to connect. This website is set up formally, and mostly in 3rd person, as if someone else was writing this material. Don't worry though, I am really Beth Graczyk, and I am here, and with you, somewhere in-between all the words and images. Happy to have you here in this space. Enjoy!
Beth Graczyk is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, performer and a scientist. Graczyk concocts sensation-based worlds built by observing and amplifying the hidden, the unseen, and the ignored, in an attempt to bring into focus peripheral stories, spaces, and ideas. She employs the use of magical thinking to shift ways of seeing and understanding through an earnest curiosity and a sliver of dark humor. She enmeshes herself and the audience as, simultaneously, active participants and outside observers, through the interplay between the imagination, the human body, and inanimate objects. Graczyk has performed throughout the United States and internationally in Japan, Ecuador, France and India for the past 17 years. Concurrently, she has contributed to 10 science publications in the field of cancer research. She co-directed the performance company Salt Horse in Seattle with Corrie Before and Angelina Baldoz from 2008-2016. After moving to NYC 3.5 years ago, Graczyk launched a solo project called Desire Motor, a series of 12 solos. The inaugural solo Beast, was produced by Gibney’s Work Up 3.0 program, and presented through Movement Research, CPR's Spring Movement Festival, Greenspace and toured to the Harrisburg Dance Festival (PA) and Corridor Festival (WA). Her most recent work, One of You Is Fake was presented by La MaMa Moves Festival in 2017, and supported through a Marble House Residency in Dorset, Vermont and the NAP program in Kutztown, PA. This past fall and winter, One of You Is Fake was selected for Oye Group’s Avant-Garde night, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and the 2018 One Catches Light Festival at Jack in Brooklyn. Graczyk has recently danced with Raja Kelly, Sara Shelton Mann & K.J. Holmes, and works part-time as a Research Specialist at Rockefeller University.
Desire Motor:
A solo performance project.
Thirst, 2018
In Thirst, Penelope Penelopinski, a shape-shifting femme queer, works to vivify the necessity of her own body through circuitous and sometimes dangerous paths. Attempting to conjure the sensations of a rebellious body through the nostalgia of punk and an overt sensual and scientific attention to domestic plants, Thirst unfolds as a physical narrative of a being who grapples between the desire to participate and the desire to seek refuge in an overgrown, overused, over-stimulated world.
One Of You Is Fake, 2017
One of You Is Fake is the second solo in Graczyk’s performance series Desire Motor following her inaugural solo Beast. Unfolding as a precariously optimistic look at the future of mankind, Graczyk engages with mundane and exquisitely made objects to question our collective participation in the erosion of the physical, sensual, and material world. Part science lecture, part song, One of You Is Fake accumulates physical movement through examining the process of formation, highlighting shifts between the natural and synthetic. Written and performed by Beth Graczyk with a performance cameo by Lindsay Head. Sound design by Cameron Shafii, visual design elements by Steven Berardelli, and costume design by Asa Brown Thornton.
Beast, 2016
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.
A solo performance project.
Thirst, 2018
In Thirst, Penelope Penelopinski, a shape-shifting femme queer, works to vivify the necessity of her own body through circuitous and sometimes dangerous paths. Attempting to conjure the sensations of a rebellious body through the nostalgia of punk and an overt sensual and scientific attention to domestic plants, Thirst unfolds as a physical narrative of a being who grapples between the desire to participate and the desire to seek refuge in an overgrown, overused, over-stimulated world.
One Of You Is Fake, 2017
One of You Is Fake is the second solo in Graczyk’s performance series Desire Motor following her inaugural solo Beast. Unfolding as a precariously optimistic look at the future of mankind, Graczyk engages with mundane and exquisitely made objects to question our collective participation in the erosion of the physical, sensual, and material world. Part science lecture, part song, One of You Is Fake accumulates physical movement through examining the process of formation, highlighting shifts between the natural and synthetic. Written and performed by Beth Graczyk with a performance cameo by Lindsay Head. Sound design by Cameron Shafii, visual design elements by Steven Berardelli, and costume design by Asa Brown Thornton.
Beast, 2016
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.
Photo credit: Effy Grey | Effyography
Sound Score for Beast: Spare Death Icon (Jason E Anderson), 'Foreign Relaxation Technique', 2011