Josie Bettman is a choreographer and performing artist currently making zygote, a dance tracing an allegorical path from an incline emerging from a polluted water’s edge to the liminal and often treacherous shoreline that is the dancer’s life. The waterway in question is Newtown creek, the superfund site/former shipping canal running through North Brooklyn, NY. By superimposing narratives of manifestation, emergence, and continuance, the work catalogues parallel efforts to reckon with modernity and the way that it has contaminated our ways of life. We, the dancers, toil along the shore, making ourselves seen, step by step, bit by bit, resilient and responsive to conditions beyond our control. At Catwalk, proximity to the Hudson River will offer a means to home in on the specifics of the relationality between the performers’ bodies and the body of water that acts as a lodestar for this process. What can we, as dancers, learn from the intelligence of these waterways, their history and continued flow?

Affiliation: Vassar