top of page

open dance figure

_DSC0521.jpg
All Photos - 1 of 1.jpeg

open dance figure looks at social dance steps as an archive of received information, reaching for self-inquiry through repetitive access to the dancefloor’s collective sociality.

By observing the same steps in different media and contexts, I can index changes in my process of self-constitution across the displacement of time. The work is ongoing as long as it continues to be transmitted and reabsorbed between the container of my body and its surroundings. Dance is a way of knowing, and its steps are receptacles of memory adapted to a terrain of constant flux. 

Z_Josie - 1 of 1.jpeg

performance history:

 Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris, FR, February 2024

Prelude Festival, CUNY Segal Center, October 2023

Corpus Delecti, NYC TOHP at Park Ave Armory, October 2023

LOCULUS festival, Northampton, MA, June 2023

Splat II, Bossa Nova Civic Club, May 2023

SECT, inc.

Trio for Table, Chair, and Performer

Trio for Table, Chair, and Performer stages the interaction between three figures as they twist and spiral in formation. As they progress through a series of positions in relation to one another, their coherence depends increasingly on sustaining a precarious relationship of dependency.  

All Photos - 1 of 1.jpeg
All Photos - 1 of 1 (1).jpeg

boléro procedures II: lec/dem/fan/fic 

choreography via SECT, inc.

text/performance: Josie Bettman

sound: Lavinia Eloise Bruce

boléro procedures II: lec/dem/fan/fic is a conceptual duet created for "A Night of Duets" organized by Juli Brandano at ing performance space in October 2021. The piece frames an encounter between a solo performer and the memory of her currently unavailable dance partner against a backdrop of projected text. 

One time, in the dressing room on the fourth floor of New York City Center Studios, Maya Plisetskaya and Ida Rubinstein shared a pair of headphones and schemed about making a dance to Ravel's Boléro. In their sweaty post-class daze, the dancers forgot to exchange phone numbers and never followed up on their idea. Boléro (Club Edit) is a speculative dance that takes this missed connection as a point of departure. 

DSC01799compressed.jpg
NEWTOWN CREEK
PARTNER DANCING
MEMORIAL ENSEMBLE

A pamphlet consisting of 4 poems and 3 images bound together in the context of spring 2020, NEWTOWN CREEK PARTNER DANCING MEMORIAL ENSEMBLE aspires to form an anchor within time as it slides by. 

6MG REGRESSION CYCLE 03/09/2020 was performed at Movement Research at the Judson Church on 03/09/2020 the week before COVID-19 shut NYC down. This dance maps the recurrence of dull urges in order to reveal the ways they are shifting all the time. It's almost always the same body, the same repetitive time. Gestures swallow back on themselves. Structures and forms riff on the habitual, simple and repetitive, at once heeding the desire to do the same thing over again, and resisting this force. 

 

Original sound by Lex Kane  

DECAY STUDY: LIGHTING INSTRUMENT--performed at the Living Gallery in Bushwick on 02/22/20--cycled through a palette of choreographic set-ups situating the performer's body behind a rear-projection screen supporting a live video feed. Choreographies lag, multiply, and vanish across the built architecture, projected light, and the performer's body. These materials stack up space, light, and time, distorting reality.

bottom of page