Desire Motor
A 12 piece project
Desire Motor
Through iterative performance research, Desire Motor investigates the growing disconnect between humans and the material world, a rupture shaped by scientific abstraction, habitual detachment, and fractured rituals of engagement. By examining this disconnection through the layered lenses of scientific knowledge, daily practice, and embodied ritual, the project seeks to reattune us to the material forces that shape and sustain us. It deepens our sensory experience of the physical world, creating space to consider our role within it, moment to moment and across evolutionary time.
Project History
A creature of ritual and long form research, I began Desire Motor in 2016 as a choreographic inquiry into the chimera of body and thought, oscillating between image, desire, the surreal, the natural world, and our urge to understand it both individually and through formal approaches such as scientific research. It also marked a personal crossing, a move from the West Coast to the East Coast, a mid career leap.
Since 2016, I have completed seven of the twelve works: Beast, One of You is Fake, Thirst, Thesis Things Do Not Bellow Long Together, Precipice, Decay Delay: Cycles of Formation, and A Body (Un)Becoming. These works have been developed and performed at Gibney Dance, Center for Performance Research, La MaMa, Movement Research, JACK, Kestrels, and The Cell, Dekum Street Theater (OR), Center for Performing Arts (MN), as well as with Pioneers Go East Collective, and through residencies at Vashon Artist Residency, Hambidge Center, and Marble House Project.
The seventh work in the series, A Body (Un)Becoming, is currently touring, with the next performance May 22/23, 2026 at Center for Performing Arts in Minneapolis.
Please see bethgraczyk.com for further history on each piece.