This performance has been cancelled, we look forward to future engagements with Kimberly Bartosik and her company.
Created on the heels of I hunger for you (BAM 2018), Kimberly Bartosik’s through the mirror of their eyes (2020 Bessie Honoree, Outstanding Production) brims with compassion and violence. The piece begins inside of a storm. A crowd of children runs through. They know which way to go: they are the bearers of direction. Featuring the extraordinary Joanna Kotze, Dylan Crossman, Burr Johnson (2020 Bessie Honoree, Outstanding Performer), and a trio of young performers, the piece is infused with reminders of time, its wild rush forward, its holding patterns, and our abilities to navigate pathways of destruction and renewal.
Presented with support from the New England Foundation for the Arts
through the mirror of their eyes features three children performing with a trio of professional dancers. The piece also includes a “crowd” scene, where the young performers, ages 9-13, invite pre-selected audience members onstage to run with the cast. During our recent premiere, this has been an incredibly powerful moment in the work, where our audiences (participants and not) have commented on the feeling of hope and possibility that this act of shared running produces…
…In each venue, the presenter will identify 2 young people who will be integrated into the piece over the course of 1-2 days. It is essential that Dahlia (14-year-old cast member) lead this transmission. The importance of what a young person holds in their body, and that their body is the vessel for non-verbal communication, is a driving concept for the work. It’s not only about learning steps but understanding, through this young body, the concept of direction (we go this way). It cannot be described or taught. It needs to be felt and shared through her.
What better way to begin to dissolve the life-saving borders that we have had to construct than to present a work that needs an audience to exist. A work that requires that we work with children in the community and that the community joins us onstage. Our bodies will be in conversation.
About Kimberly Bartosik
Choreographer, performer, educator, writer Kimberly Bartosik creates viscerally provocative, ferociously intimate choreographic projects that are built upon the development of a virtuosic movement language, rigorous conceptual explorations, and the creation of highly theatricalized environments. Her work, which is deeply informed by literature and cinema, dramatically illuminates the ephemeral nature of performance.
Bartosik is a 2020 Bessie Honoree for Outstanding Production for through the mirror of their eyes. She is a 2021 recipient of the Doris Duke Foundation Performing Artist Recovery Fund in the New York Community Trust; a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Choreography; and a 2020-21 Virginia B. Toulmin Women Leaders in Dance Fellow at Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU where she is creating The Encounter, an intergenerational project for professionals and pre-professionals. Her 2018 project, I hunger for you, was commissioned and presented by BAM Next Wave Festival and LUMBERYARD Center for Film & Performing Arts. She was a 2017-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency Artist, where she premiered through the mirror of their eyes in March 2020. In NYC her work has also been commissioned and presented by American Realness, FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, Abrons Art Center, Gibney, Danspace Project, The Kitchen, La Mama, and BEAT Festival. Kimberly has toured to Bratislava in Movement (2021), Supersense: Festival of the Ecstatic (Melbourne, Australia), Wexner Arts Center, Dance Place, American Dance Festival, The Yard, MASS MoCA/Jacob’s Pillow, The Flynn, Bates Dance Festival, Church (ME), The Dance Center at Columbia College, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Mount Tremper Arts, Festival Rencontres Chorégraphique Internationales de Seine-Saint Denis, Artdanthe Festival, and others.
Bartosik has received support from the National Dance Project (NDP) Production & Touring Grant and Community Engagement Fund awards, supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts. She is a MAP Fund grantee and a recipient of awards from the Jerome Foundation; FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance), a program of the New England Foundation for the Arts in partnership with The Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French American Cultural Exchange; Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, USArtists International; Creative Arts Initiative (CAI); New York Foundation for the Arts, Building Up Infrastructure Levels for Dance (BUILD); American Dance Abroad; New Music USA, Live Music for Dance; and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists and Emergency Grants. Bartosik has been a Harkness Dance Center Artist-in-Residence @ the 92nd St Y; an Exploring the Metropolis (EtM) Choreographer/Composer recipient; a Dancing Laboratory Residency Artist at the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron; a Bogliasco Foundation Fellow Gibney Dance DiP Residence Artist. In 2018, Bartosik made her curatorial debut as part of DoublePlus at Gibney.
Creative residence include: New York Live Arts, Live Feed and Studio Series; Marble House Project; National Choreographic Center at Akron/NCCAkron; Centre Chorégraphique National-Ballet de Lorraine; LUMBERYARD Center for Film & Performing Arts; Gibney Dance Center’s DiP Residency; Centre Chorégraphique National de Franche-Comté à Belfort, France; Governor’s Island through Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space Program; Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University; Joyce Soho Artist Residency Program; University of Buffalo, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center; Jacob’s Pillow; Kaatsbaan International Dance Center; Mount Tremper Arts; White Oak Plantation; and Movement Research.
Bartosik was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 9 years and received a Bessie Award for Exceptional Artistry in his work. She was a 2019 and 2015 Merce Cunningham Trust Fellow and continues to work with the Trust to develop innovative educational programs for youth. She received her BFA in Dance from North Carolina School of the Arts, and MA in 20th Century Art and Art Criticism from The Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Research of the New School University. Bartosik has been a guest artist/faculty at The Ailey School, Sarah Lawrence College, SUNY/Purchase Conservatory of Dance, Hollins University, Princeton University, The Juilliard School, Rutgers University, Bates College, The Playground, University of North Carolina School for the Arts, Arizona State University’s Hergberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Colorado College, and University of Buffalo.