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. If you are a someone who was looking for another Beth Graczyk, well, I don't know what to tell you. I've looked too. If you want to know more about performance or dance, read on! 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 splash 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, including a first author paper in Analytical Biochemistry. As a solo artist, Graczyk launched a 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. Currently, One of You Is Fake is 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.
"A focused exploration amidst the contours of human interiority, One of You is Fake seeks a solace that the present moment, or near-past, or fast-approaching future for that matter, can never quite provide. As its audience, we are left with a firm belief in a pursuit of honest connection; true human relationships — physical, emotional, electronic or otherwise — may be our one saving grace."
-Tara Sheena, Culturebot, NYC, May 2017 on One of You Is Fake at La MaMa Moves Festival
"Throughout, her dance movements portrayed a natural and seemingly effortless control of her body to offer a believable notion of communicating with inanimate objects and a convincing translation of feeling into gesture."
"In all, these "plays" and their associated objects lean toward a hybrid form of performance art and conceptual sculpture as much as the overall category of dance by collaborating fully with the props, the other performers and even the audience for an intriguing, capable and totally piquant experience."
- Ron Schira, Reading Eagle, PA, Oct 2017 on One of You Is Fake for New Arts Program
“The refined wit of choreographer and published scientist Beth Graczyk…provided us
with expansive and imaginative landscapes of the past, present and futuristic worlds”.
- Maura Donohue, CultureBot, NYC, Feb 2017 for Not My President Performance at La MaMa
Read a thoughtful preview by Tara Sheena in Culturebot: Here
Desire Motor:
A solo performance project.
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.
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.
Desire Motor stems from time spent with the writings and thoughts of a myriad of voices including Duchamp, Octavia Butler, Virginia 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.
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."
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."
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
