“The piece began with a dreamy, quiet, and specifically delicate quality. I became absorbed into the dawning of this world… The unexpected humor, their rage, then their touching connection and empathy. It was over too soon.”
— Austin Selden, dance-maker on A Body (Un)Becoming
— Austin Selden, dance-maker on A Body (Un)Becoming
A Body (Un) Becoming
Thank you to all who came out to our performances!
“Every moment in this dance happens either at the pace of discovery or evolution, leaving a lot of time for the viewer’s mind to drift in and out of our own imaginative landscapes” - Alyza DelPan-Monley, Seattle Dance (2025)
Read our feature in Lavender Magazine by Shane Lueck
Read an interview of our collaborators in Hill & Lake Press by Josie Owens
Read an interview by David Anderson in AnderScene
Read our feature in Lavender Magazine by Shane Lueck
Read an interview of our collaborators in Hill & Lake Press by Josie Owens
Read an interview by David Anderson in AnderScene
A Body (Un)Becoming is a dance duet with live musicians that explores the tension between decay and transformation. In this performance, the body meets disintegrating materials through acts of touch, labor, and experimentation. The piece investigates what new forms can emerge through pressure, heat, and attention which is also reflected in the kinetic sculptures made from eggshells. By animating overlooked materials—including an aging female-identified body— the work challenges fixed ideas of being and utility: fragile, reforming, and ongoing.
Directed by Beth Graczyk
Performed by Leah Wilks, Beth Graczyk, cellist Laura Sewell & vocalist Thomasina Petrus
Music by Aaron Gabriel
Lighting Design: Jeff Forbes (Portland), ILVS STRAUSS (Seattle), Mike Grogan (Minneapolis)
Costumes Asa Thornton
Photos by Effy Grey
Directed by Beth Graczyk
Performed by Leah Wilks, Beth Graczyk, cellist Laura Sewell & vocalist Thomasina Petrus
Music by Aaron Gabriel
Lighting Design: Jeff Forbes (Portland), ILVS STRAUSS (Seattle), Mike Grogan (Minneapolis)
Costumes Asa Thornton
Photos by Effy Grey
Thank you for all who came to our recent Portland, Seattle & Minneapolis Shows!
Center for Performing Arts, Minneaplis, MN May 2026
Center for Performing Arts, Minneapolis, (Music residency) MN Nov 2025
Dekum Street Theater, Portland, OR, Oct 2025
BASE, Seattle, WA, Oct 2025
Center for Performing Arts, Minneaplis, MN May 2026
Center for Performing Arts, Minneapolis, (Music residency) MN Nov 2025
Dekum Street Theater, Portland, OR, Oct 2025
BASE, Seattle, WA, Oct 2025
Beth Graczyk is a choreographer, educator, scientist, writer and Artistic Director of Beth Graczyk Productions.
My interdisciplinary practice explores the tension between concrete knowledge and the more elusive, felt experiences of the body. It emerges from my lived experience moving between two ways of understanding the world: as a published biochemist working within academic frameworks of observation and inquiry, and as a dancer whose imagination was shaped by long stretches of childhood spent wandering the rural landscapes of the Pacific Northwest.
Science offered methods for asking questions, gathering evidence, and constructing knowledge. Dance offered a different mode of inquiry, one rooted in sensation, intuition, imagination, and embodied experience. Rather than resolving these perspectives, my work inhabits the space between them. I am interested in how uncertainty, perception, and materiality shape our understanding of the world, and in the ways knowledge is continually constructed, challenged, and transformed.
Drawing on these questions, I create performances, installations, films, and collaborative projects rooted in visceral impulses that foreground perspectives often overlooked, including femme-identifying, neurodivergent, LGBTQIA2+ bodies, and non-human forms. Through a dialogue between dance, science, and material experimentation, I create spaces where language disintegrates into the body, opening pathways to the unconscious, the subconscious, and other forms of the unknowable.
Humor enters the work as a companion to vulnerability. Shape-shifting plant-humans, sentient biomaterials, evolutionary histories, and other unlikely companions invite audiences into questions of desire, adaptation, loneliness, and belonging, while exploring science not as fixed knowledge, but as a process of inquiry.
My interdisciplinary practice explores the tension between concrete knowledge and the more elusive, felt experiences of the body. It emerges from my lived experience moving between two ways of understanding the world: as a published biochemist working within academic frameworks of observation and inquiry, and as a dancer whose imagination was shaped by long stretches of childhood spent wandering the rural landscapes of the Pacific Northwest.
Science offered methods for asking questions, gathering evidence, and constructing knowledge. Dance offered a different mode of inquiry, one rooted in sensation, intuition, imagination, and embodied experience. Rather than resolving these perspectives, my work inhabits the space between them. I am interested in how uncertainty, perception, and materiality shape our understanding of the world, and in the ways knowledge is continually constructed, challenged, and transformed.
Drawing on these questions, I create performances, installations, films, and collaborative projects rooted in visceral impulses that foreground perspectives often overlooked, including femme-identifying, neurodivergent, LGBTQIA2+ bodies, and non-human forms. Through a dialogue between dance, science, and material experimentation, I create spaces where language disintegrates into the body, opening pathways to the unconscious, the subconscious, and other forms of the unknowable.
Humor enters the work as a companion to vulnerability. Shape-shifting plant-humans, sentient biomaterials, evolutionary histories, and other unlikely companions invite audiences into questions of desire, adaptation, loneliness, and belonging, while exploring science not as fixed knowledge, but as a process of inquiry.
Desire Motor
Thresholds
Other Collaborations
Biography
Beth Graczyk (she/her) is a choreographer, director, performer, and educator who has been based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn) for the past 11 years. With a 24-year career as both an artist and scientist, Graczyk builds interdisciplinary bridges across fields. She is the Artistic Director of Beth Graczyk Productions, Inc. (BGP, founded 2020), a nonprofit that merges art and science while centering queer and neurodivergent perspectives. Since 2006, she has choreographed and presented work across the US and internationally (Japan, China, India), with presentations by Velocity Dance Center, Gibney, On the Boards, ODC, La MaMa, JACK, CPR, Movement Research amongst others. Her recent dance documentary Waiting for the Bus (2024) with Michael Wolfe was selected for NY Global Lift-Off, Sans Souci, Winter Film Festival, and the 2026 Minnesota Shorts Showcase. She has taught Improvisation, Composition, Contemporary Forms and Interdisciplinary Practice as a guest artist at University of Washington, University of Michigan, Peridance, Montclair University, De Sales University, and others. Her work has deepened through residencies at Marble House (VT), Vashon Island Residency (WA), and Hambidge (GA). She holds a double degree from the University of Washington in Dance & Molecular Biology and an MFA in Dance from Montclair (a recent 2026 graduate). In parallel, she is a biochemist & co-author of 11 science publications and currently conducts neuroscience sensory research in the Ruta Lab at The Rockefeller University. She has worked with numerous artists including Corrie Befort, Torben Ulrich, John Maria Gutierrez (G^2), Aaron Gabriel, Amy Chavasse, and has danced for Sara Shelton Mann, Mark Haim, Raja Kelly, Molly Scott and K.J. Holmes among others. @bethgraczyk
Beth Graczyk Productions, Inc is a 501(c)(3) based in NYC
Beth Graczyk Productions, Inc is committed to anti-racism and de-colonization practices through self-education, community engagement, and sustaining connections and support with individuals and organizations engaging in the work.
Video & edit: Rooftop, Beth Graczyk
Photos: Effy Grey
Photos: Effy Grey