Kimberly Bartosik/daela & Joanna Kotze

Catch two Bessie Award–winning, New York City–based dance artists on the rise in this special program that showcases their deep training, abundant virtuosity, and transformative choreographic visions. 

Created by former Merce Cunningham Dance Company member Kimberly Bartosik, the intimate duet Étroits sont les vaisseaux (2016) shares its title with a monumental, sinuous sculpture by Anselm Kiefer and a surreal, oceanic poem by Saint-John Perse. Performed by Lance Gries (known for his work with Trisha Brown) and Joanna Kotze (a frequent dancer for Kimberly Bartosik/daela), Bartosik’s precise choreography is designed to be seen up close as it collapses a rhythmic tidal cycle into minutes and seconds. The pair navigate waves of sound and light with an intense focus and charged—at times, erotic—physical presence. Like the tide, Étroits is cyclical, ending where it begins, but with subtle shifts from trembling to tenderness that leave unsettling remnants in their wake. As the New Yorker observed, the work showcases “Bartosik [as] a savvy explorer of the interstices of intimacy.”

After Étroits, Joanna Kotze presents her own Bessie Award–winning trio IT HAPPENED IT HAD HAPPENED IT IS HAPPENING IT WILL HAPPEN (2013). In this smartly crafted piece, Kotze (who also holds a degree in architecture) confronts the seductiveness of ordering and structuring while attempting to hold onto the vulnerable and unnameable. As the New York Times noted, the piece “reveal[s] a mind capable of transforming a familiar space into something eerie and unrecognizable,” continuing elsewhere, “leaving room for uncertainty…this restless piece remains formidable and strange.”

Please note: No late seating permitted for this performance.

This project is made possible in part by support from the National Performance Network (NPN) Performance Residency Program. For more information: www.npnweb.org.