Award-winning choreographers to perform at Wexner Center

Andrea Oh
Wed, 14 Feb 2018 03:59:28 +0000
Arts & Life, Events, charles helm, ?troits sont les vaisseaux, featured, It Happened It Happened It Is Happening It Will Happen, Joanna Kotze, Kimberly Bartosik/daela, new york city, wexner center for the arts

Kimberly Bartosik/daela, ?troits sont les Vaisseaux. Credit: Courtesy of Ryutaro Mishima

New York City-based artists Kimberly Bartosik, whose stage name is Kimberly Bartoski/daela, and Joanna Kotze will collaborate on a program that showcases their intensive training and “transformative choreographic visions,” according to the Wexner Center’s website.

The joint program will feature Bartosik’s duet “?troits sont les vaisseaux” and Kotze’s trio “It Happened It Happened It Is Happening It Will Happen.” It will be the first time the duet and trio have performed together, despite the artists’ long history of working with each other since 2009.

The “Kimberly Bartosik/daela & Joanna Kotze” event was formed after Charles Helm, the Wexner Center”s former director, discovered both pieces last January in New York City.

“It was a brilliant curation on Helm’s part,” Bartosik said. “The works complement each other very beautifully, and I wish more people would be as inspired as Chuck to honor our relationship.”

Bartosik’s duet, performed by Lance Gries and Kotze, is inspired by German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer’s 82-foot-long sculpture of the same name, “?troits sont les vaisseaux,” which translates to “narrow are the vessels.”

“I was so moved because it was a mix of brutality and beauty and this unlikeliness of undulating concrete — these really beautiful, contradictory senses that the sculpture evokes,” Bartosik said. “The piece is actually constructed to be witnessed as a cycle, as if you’re walking into the ocean for part of the tide.”

Kimberly Bartosik/daela, ?troits sont les Vaisseaux. Credit: Courtesy of Scott Shaw

For the remainder of the program, Kotze will continue to perform in her own trio alongside dancers Stuart Singer and Netta Yerushalmy. Kotze said the focus of the piece is the relationship between bodies and space.

“The architecture of the body in space, how we are shaping the space for the viewer, how we’re inhabiting the space with the viewer, how we are in relationship to each other and really looking at how things can be structured and ordered … while allowing for a lot of unknown, vulnerable and unnameable things to be present,” she said.

Though Bartosik said the two performances are widely different, both artists shared excitement over seeing how their works will fit together for the first time.

“I feel really lucky and privileged to not only be working with Kimberly but to be on a program with her,” Kotze said. “And we both feel very privileged to have our work at the Wexner Center.”

The event will take place at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at Weigel Hall in the Wexner Center. Admission is $10 for students and $22 for the general public.