Artist Statement
I am a choreographer, dance artist, biochemist, writer, fabricator, and filmmaker who explores the alignments and incongruencies of what appear to be concrete facts with what is felt and observed within the human experience. At the core of my work are intersectional dialogues that focus on expressing unseen or ignored perspectives, including female-identifying, neurodiverse, LGBTQIA2+, and non-human forms in nature. My practice centers around forming structures from visceral impulses that examine the interplay between uncertainty and materiality, particularly in relation to pleasure, perception, vulnerability and connection.
The following are three interdisciplinary projects that exemplify my principles, practices and performance experiments:
- Desire Motor is a series of 12 interconnected works to be created over 12 years (2016-2028) that engage with the transformation of material objects to embody the dissonances between internal wants and external realities. To date, six are complete Beast, One of You Is Fake, Thirst, Thesis Things Do Not Bellow Long Together, Precipice and Decay Delay: Cycles of Formation. Through iterative performance research, Desire Motor aims to crack open the relationship between humans and nature, and examine it through the lens of scientific information, daily practices, and rituals of engagement. As we feel the breadth of the effects of the Anthropocene period, what are ways that we imagine a future where humans can continue to co-create with the natural world? Can we plasticize our imagination through tactile explorations of this physical world with our bodies? Can we imagine co-transformations both real and imagined?
- Thresholds is a multi-artist installation-performance hybrid born out of the desire to work cross-disciplinary within science, social justice, disability awareness and art. Thresholds uses movement, sound, film, fabrication and text to explore the diversity of human consciousness and sensory processing through the boundaries of perception. In 2023, we created the short film Waiting for the Bus.
- Curatorial programming: Throughout my career, I have developed a curating practice that builds community, supports artists, and stimulates dialogue around intersections between art and science. These programs aim to 1) bring artists and scientists together to inspire new aspects of their individual practices; 2) introduce audiences to new artists and scientists; and, 3) build a supportive environment in which artists and audiences can explore ideas together.
Extended Biography
Beth Graczyk is a choreographer, a performer, and a scientist. For the past 19 years, Graczyk has performed throughout the United States and internationally in Japan, Ecuador, France and India, participating in over 50 dance projects both as a dancer and a choreographer. Concurrently, she has contributed to 10 science publications in the field of cancer research, including a first author paper in Analytical Biochemistry.
Graczyk began generating work through practicing and performing improvisation with dancers and experimental musicians between 2002-2008 in Seattle. During this period, she produced several one-off events and series, including 12 Hour Play, a non-stop durational improvisation with dancers and musicians, running from 6pm-6am. Her primary music collaborators and co-producers were Jason E. Anderson & Tom Baker. In 2008, Graczyk shifted focus to choreography, with the desire to generate performances that contained kinetic and imagistic realizations of visual, sonic and narrative ideas. Having come from an improvisation background, Graczyk interweaved improvisation, creating hybrid set & un-set performance pieces. She co-founded/co-directed the Seattle-based company Salt Horse (2008-2016) with choreographer Corrie Befort and musician Angelina Baldoz. Together, they generated 4 evening-length works, 4 commissions, and toured nationally. In 2016, Graczyk started a new performance company with Befort. They premiered Rose Blue, in 2016 at Triskelion Arts in New York and toured to BASE in Seattle.
In 2012, Graczyk met up with Torben Ulrich, a Danish icon and transdisciplinary artist who initiated a project with Graczyk and Baldoz called Cacophony for 8 Players. This work developed over a period of 2 years with Ulrich proposing extensive research on the ideas of 8 artistic voices of the past including Bharata Muni and Maya Deren. Ulrich challenged Graczyk to understand these voices and their ideas through their own writing and utilize them as a landscape for creating a new work. Ulrich radically shifted the nature of Graczyk’s approach to choreography by continuously posing new challenges and constraints, and through infusing the sensation and practice of non-binary thinking.
In 2014, Graczyk worked with palliative care doctor and composer Hope Wechkin. This collaboration became The Withing Project, which examines the question of how we connect to ourselves and others focusing on end-of-life care and connection. This project was with director Cathy Madden and neuroscientist Leanna Standish. Graczyk taught movement practices developed from the process of choreographing for this work to medical students at the University of Michigan.
With a relocation to New York City in fall 2014 from Seattle, Graczyk launched a project consisting of primarily solos, called Desire Motor. Coming from an extensive history of collaboration, Graczyk wished to find space for a solitary creative practice around the nature of desire, and how humans dislocate or blend their innate internal desires, wants, and longings with an external reality. She has created 6 works in the series: Beast, One of You Is Fake, Thirst, Thesis Things Do Not Bellow Long Together, Precipice, and Decay Delay: Cycles of Formation. These works have been supported in development through New Arts Program (PA), a Marble House Residency (VT), and an AIRspace Studio Residency at Abrons Arts Center and have been produced and presented by Gibney (Work Up 3.0), La MaMa Moves Festival, Oye Group, Pioneers Go East Collective, CPR, Movement Research, Chez Bushwick, and Jack.
As a dancer, Beth has worked extensively with several dance artists including Sara Shelton Mann (2014-Present), the feath3r theory (2014-2017), Mark Haim (2011-2015), Scott/Powell Performance (2005-2011) Locate Performance Group (2002-2006), Sheri Cohen & Co. (2000-2004), and Corrie Befort (2003-2005).
Graczyk earned a double degree in Dance and Molecular Biology in 2002 from the University of Washington in Seattle. She worked as a Research Scientist in biochemistry at the University of Washington from 2002-2014 and at The Rockefeller University since 2014. Her work as a scientist has traversed molecular and structural studies of cell division with Dr. Trisha Davis, structural studies of blood coagulation factors associated with human disease with Dr. Jan Breslow, visual perception studies with neuroscientist Dr. Guadalupe Astorga, and currently structural studies in olfactory receptors in insects in the laboratory of Dr. Vanessa Ruta. Graczyk has given talks on the creative process in dance and science and with her former boss, the department chair of Biochemistry, Trisha Davis.
* Photo credit - Effyography