More than everything and still be all: Kimberly Bartosik’s I hunger for you
Kimberly Bartosik/daela, photo by Alon Koppe.
Since leaving the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) in 1996, Kimberly Bartosik has been carving out an identity as a fluid, emotive dancer, and more recently, masterful choreographer, who leans into Cunningham’s signature geometric choreography. As a Cunningham scholar, I have had the privilege of experiencing work created by choreographers who had danced in the MCDC; I felt particularly invested in experiencing Bartosik’s I hunger for you which was presented at Columbia College’s Dance Center after premiering at the Lumberyard in 2018.
Where Cunningham’s company repository was defined with his radical methods of composition, and strict formalism of movement, Bartosik’s work shifts more towards a “real” of the body, of emotion, of connection. For the plaintively titled I hunger for you, Bartosik worked with long-time muse Joanna Kotze, alongside the remarkable cast of Lindsey Jones, Burr Johnson, Christian Allen, and Dylan Crossman, each of whom brought a clarity of voice to the work’s persistence. Bartosik understands the chemistry of the dancers with whom she works, trusting in the unique energy that they each contribute to the work. This dynamic is not to be underestimated, and when coupled with the intimate staging, sound and lighting design, a collaboration with Bartosik’s long-term partner, Roderick Murray. Murray’s quietly dramatic contrast between and light and dark craft the tension of the work. For Kotze, Crossman, Johnson, and Allen, desire hinged on addiction, craving, finally arriving to a place where the beautiful falls into ugliness, sensuality towards violence. The physicality of the work extended to the small audience, seated on the dance floor around three sides of the stage.
Dahlia Bartosik-Murray in I hunger for you, photo by Ian Douglas.
I hunger for you is crafted over two informal chapters, separated by a powerful, yet poignant entr'acte featuring Bartosik’s young daughter Dahlia Bartosik-Murray. Cunningham showed up in the first section, where the core dancers enter the stage, and in the casting of Dylan Crossman (who was a member of the final Merce Cunningham Dance Company [2009-2011]). In this initial section, Baitosik’s background of geometric positions, and concurrent movement recalled Cunningham’s Beach Birds (1993), or Tread (1970), in that the movement developed a group of individuals who shared a social togetherness. Any connection to Cunningham’s style quickly loosened however, as relations between the dancers were built. Kotze and Crossman’s connection was immediate, challenged by the dynamism of Johnson and Allen’s work together. Following the opening sequence, much of the content of the work was built through duets between these two pairs. Lindsey Jones, while a part of the group, remained, for much of the first half of the work an outsider – as a member of a friend circle that remained unaffected by the more charged interpersonal relationships of the other four individuals. In an apotheosis of the first half of the work, Kotze and Crossman stand facing each other, as if whispering an intimate conversation. As if repelled by a magnetic force, Kozte’s flattened palms nearly touch her partner but never quite do. In their minds they fall into each other, with their bodies they try, and fail to. As the pairs separate into isolation, Bartosik-Murray quietly walks on the stage and sits, cross-legged--an Amelie-like figure, quiet and non-judgmental, as she seemingly understands the depth of feeling she witnesses.
I hunger for you, photo by Jim Coleman.
In introducing I hunger for you, Bartosik asks “Where does the desire for faith locate itself in the body?” Detaching the quest for faith from a spiritual quest, Bartosik seemed to be questioning our need for faith in ourselves, in each other, in our choices. The question framed the work as a personal interrogation, through movement into recurring trauma, behavior, and encounters. Over the second half of the work, the desire and frustration introduced in the first half, and interrupted by Bartosik-Murray’s quiet presence, becomes increasingly manic, lusting, insistent. There the choreography builds quickly, a maelstrom that pulls in the formerly distant Jones.
Burr Johnson and Joanna Kotze in I hunger for you, photo by Sally Cohn.
I hunger for you is not an event. The work is an experience in which time seems to be compressed and extended, each action rapidly advancing the arc of the work, like a feature length film that covers a story of decades. Beauty melts away into raw insistence, beyond physical and mental exhaustion, until the persistence of physical action becomes the fragile framework of a hope that, if stopped, we will lose. Bartosik wrote that the “work looks deeply into the heart of the impulse to lose oneself in ecstasy, ritual, desire, and searching.”
I hunger for you, photo by: Jim Coleman.
Heartbreaking is that what is sought is not found, despite having been insisted upon, demanded, forced. It appears and glimmers but then loses itself in its own cyclical passion, like the unfixed state of love in Jack Gilbert’s poem, The Great Fires (1994). Instead, the arc of the work operates in what scholar Michael Bernard-Donals refers to as the “impasse between speech and silence, memory and forgetting.” Persistent in their need, the dancers mask the reality of their own trauma, through honing in on its essence by re-performing a version of it to the point of utter exhaustion. It meant something when I realized the work had been created almost three years ago, and premiered two. My experience of 2018 was not dissimilar from the relationship created on stage, a space in history and my own life that is at once a distant episode, but one that has established a new normal, a type of resolve that does not exist within the work.
I hunger for you, photo by: Jim Coleman.
Yet the takeaway is hopeful, the quest for remains. It is a type of blind faith, or belief that keeps the cast in I hunger for you going, even as their actions seem to move them further and further away from what is desired. Bartosik and Murray created a space between trauma and recovery. Maurice Blanchot wrote that “it is dark disaster that brings the light” and in I hunger for you, the human tendency to go into these dark spaces to find the light, existing in the sliver of space between the two. This spring, Bartosik will return to the work through a New York Live Arts residency, adapting it into a new work, simply entitled I hunger.
Mary L. Coyne is a curator and writer. She is a Research Associate in Contemporary Art at the Art Institute Chicago where is working on performance commissions and contemporary collection projects. Coyne was formerly an Exhibition Curatorial Assistant at the Walker Art Center (2016-2017) following a Research Fellowship (2014-2016), and held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2012), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (2012), Los Angeles MoCA (2011). In 2014, she operated Pseudo Empire, a non-commercial project space in Brooklyn, and has curated group exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York and Minneapolis, and recently opened a group exhibition for SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen (2019).
Coyne’s writing has appeared in AfterImage, Art Journal, Artpulse, Droste Effect, the Journal for Curatorial Studies, L'Officiel Art Italia, Mousse, and Museum and Curatorial Studies Review, among other publications. Mary holds a MA in Art (Curatorial Studies) from California State University, Long Beach and a BA in Art History from the University of Southern California.
