"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.
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. 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 offers 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. This project proposes larger questions and research around how we can infuse our individual interior with rigorous imaginative play to break open the possibilities of how we experience and participate in the external world.
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:
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
- Holley Farmer, Bessie-award winner & dance artist, NYC, 2016
Desire Motor:
A solo performance project.
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. 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 offers 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. This project proposes larger questions and research around how we can infuse our individual interior with rigorous imaginative play to break open the possibilities of how we experience and participate in the external world.
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:
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."
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
