Joanna Kotze. Photo by Mattias Givell. Courtesy the artist.
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For These are precarious times…, dancer, choreographer, and educator Joanna Kotze assembles Martita Abril, Natalie Green, Catherine Kirk, and Molly Poerstel – four artists who embody power, vulnerability, rigor, beauty, and risk in both their work and their performances – to share new work in development.
OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.
PROGRAM
Martita Abril: Cart lady
Heavy on the hands
Light on the feet
Razor sharp
Smooth as slow mo
Melting underground
Floating above
Cleaving too cleavers
Smog as creatures
Deepen too deep
Peed too nepeed
What is
Who is
Where is
Blow this
Clack clack
This is the rhythm of my life
In out
Adentro por dentro
Natalie Green: Sharp Wave Ripple
This dance is a distress signal.
Catherine Kirk: No Fire Was Too Quick
No Fire Was Too Quick is a portrait of the fickle and fleeting virality of pop culture and news in today’s society. Using a medley of excerpts from existing repertory woven in with unfinished ideas and new concepts, brain rot is honored and a further diminishing attention span is highlighted.
Molly Poerstel: Flesh House (excerpt)
Flesh House (solo excerpt) premiered at Kestrels in 2024 as a trio exposing the personal path, old truths, and inter-lapping connected experiences of dance performers. Within this scaffold, the work also interrogates the immediacy of embedded memory through improvisational scores, text, and visual imagery, and reveals how the mythologies, stories, and experiences of our past come with us into choreography. These interconnected solos give value and voice to a dancer’s story. Revealing the silent labor of our work within the choreographic process, as a live tenable force that breeds and populates the work of the maker.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Martita Abril (Pichu) is an artist from the border city of Tijuana, México. She has collaborated with Lux Boreal, Kim Brandt, Yanira Castro, Yoshiko Chuma, Milka Djordevich, Tess Dworman, Devynn Emory, Daria Fain and Robert Kocik, Lily Gold, Allyson Green, Abigail Levine, Mina Nishimura, Cori Olinghouse, Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Will Rawls, David Thomson, Larissa Velez-Jackson, and Cathy Weis. Martita was a performer in Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions and most recently the Mirrors I & II piece by Joan Jonas at the Museum of Modern Art. She was part of the Fresh Tracks Residency at New York Live Arts, the Dance and Process artist in residency at The Kitchen, and she is currently in the Movement Research AIR Program, funded, in part, by Mertz Gilmore Foundation. She also continues to guide workshops in Bushwick gardens to immigrant familias, through the iLAND program by Jennifer Monson. Martita co-curates In/Between, the annual immigrant artist group exhibition at New York Live Arts in partnership with NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program originally created by Yanira Castro, Martita, and Poppy DeltaDawn. She is currently the Director of Movement Research at the Judson Church, is the Trisha Brown Dance Company Tour Manager, and a mentor to Immigrant artists as part of the NYFA Coaching program.
Natalie Green has danced for Donna Uchizono, RoseAnne Spradlin, Anna Sperber, Tere O'Connor, Juliette Mapp, Heather Kravas, Levi Gonzalez, Annie-B Parson, and Big Dance Theater. She was a 2023 Movement Research Parent Artist in Residence and has presented work at Dance Theater Workshop, The Chocolate Factory Theater, and BAX, among other NYC venues. She grew up in Austin, TX and is a graduate of SUNY Purchase.
Catherine Kirk is a performing artist, dancer/choreographer, and teaching artist from the unceded land of the Kiickaapoi and Wichita peoples, now known as Dallas, TX. She has a BFA in dance from New York University, gained her Yoga certification through The Perri Institute for Mind and Body, and is Reiki certified. Despite making New York her home base, Catherine's Southern upbringing lingers on in her artistic expression. Inspired by dreams of Black liberation through leisure and rest as an entry and end point to action, Catherine leans towards creating leisurely and socially complex environments that tell stories grounded in soul, communal care, and social equity with strong reference to the fleeting virality within pop culture. Her movement is anchored in release, improvisation, and her ancestral groove. Catherine has created work for installation spaces, commercials, and short films, has presented two solo works supported as an Artist-in-Residence at Art Cake Brooklyn (2020) and Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation (2021), and curated an evening for Chez Bushwick’s RECESS (2023). Catherine has collaborated and performed with Jasmine Hearn, Sidra Bell Dance New York, Kyle Marshall, Burr Johnson, and Helen Simoneau, and is featured in the award-winning Netflix series, Halston and in the Showtime series Ziwe. Catherine has performed works by an array of choreographers including Bebe Miller, Sharon Eyal, Doug Varone, Keerati Jinakunwiphat, and Andrea Miller. Catherine danced with A.I.M by Kyle Abraham for 11 years, and is currently in her second season with Trisha Brown Dance Company.
Joanna Kotze is a Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and educator. She creates highly physical dance performances through a collaborative, multi-disciplinary process, presenting ways to look at effort, labor, humor, violence, unpredictability, and beauty through movement as well as the body’s relationship to sound, light, physical materials and space. Joanna recently received a 2024 Grant to Artists from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her piece What will we be like when we get there, was nominated for a Bessie in 2018 for Outstanding Music Composition and Sound Design by collaborator Ryan Seaton and she received the Bessie for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer in 2013. Her choreography has been presented by UtahPresents, American Dance Festival, Wanås Konst, Irondale, The Yard, Bates Dance Festival, Stonington Opera House, New York Live Arts, Wexner Center, Velocity, the NAC in Ottawa, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Danspace Project, ADI, Bard, Jacob’s Pillow, DNA, Roulette, Dixon Place, 92nd Street Y, Movement Research at Judson, and others. She has been supported through residencies throughout the US and Europe and has taught classes and workshops around the world. Joanna currently dances for Kimberly Bartosik (2009-present) and Stacy Spence, and has worked with Wally Cardona (2000-2010,2018), Annie-B Parson, Donna Uchizono, Tendayi Kuumba, Kota Yamazaki, Netta Yerushalmy, Sam Kim, Sarah Skaggs, Christopher Williams, the Metropolitan Opera ballet, Daniel Charon, and others. She is originally from South Africa and has a BA in Architecture from Miami University. joannakotze.com
Molly Poerstel is a dance artist whose career spans twenty-five years. A powerful performer, she has gained recognition over the years for her work with Mark Jarecke, David Dorfman Dance Company, Alex Escalante, Susan Rethorst, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Hilary Clark, Ivy Baldwin, Juliana F. May, Roseanne Spradlin, and Jeanine Durning. Poerstel was nominated for a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Sustained Achievement in Dance Performance in 2019. Her current choreographic body of works are a trilogy of explorations into embodied memory. I am Also – Monte (2021) was commissioned by Abrons Art Center, featuring acclaimed house dancer Monte Jones, Flesh House (2023), an interconnected trio of solos for herself, Monte Jones, and Eleanor Smith, premiered at Kestrels in Brooklyn, and her next work, Galactic Ash (working title) considers the in-between spaces of our past and future identities through the complicated binds of grief, ancestry, and lineage. Poerstel was a 2015 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and a 2018 BAX Parent Space Grant Recipient. She has taught at The Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, SUNY Purchase Dance Conservatory, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, Dalton School, and the Nanyang School of the Fine Arts in Singapore.