Kimberly Bartosik/daela, bLUr

About the Performance

In bLUr, choreographer Kimberly Bartosik crafts a haunting, visceral world where five performers navigate cycles of desire, care, violence, and tender rescue. Over 45 minutes, scenes unfold like emotional ruptures and reconciliations, bodies collapsing and lifting one another as time folds and fractures. Built out of Bartosik’s own experiences and deeply shaped by the individuality of her performers, bLUr is both specific and universal in its exploration of trauma, rescue, and embodied desire. Performers—each bringing their own physical signatures—move through states of exhaustion, eroticism, fragmentation, and ferocious endurance, reminding us how powerful and fragile our need for one another really is.

About the Artist

Kimberly Bartosik (artistic director) is a choreographer, performer, educator, and writer. She is a 2024 National Dance Project Production Grant (NDP) recipient from New England Foundation for the Arts; a 2025 New York State Council on the Arts/NYSCA Support for Artists Award grantee with support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and a 2025 Harkness Foundation for Dance Project Grant recipient. Other recent awards include: the Doris Duke Foundation Performing Artist Recovery Fund in the New York Community Trust; 2020 Bessie Award Honoree for Outstanding Production; Sybil Shearer Fellowship at the Ragdale Foundation; Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography; Virginia B. Toulmin Women Leaders in Dance Fellowship at Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU. Bartosik’s work has been commissioned and presented by BAM Next Wave, New York Live Arts, Crossing the Line Festival, Bates Dance Festival, Torn Space Theater,  American Dance Festival, LUMBERYARD, American Realness, Abrons Art Center, Gibney, Danspace Project, The Kitchen, La Mama, and others. She has toured to Supersense: Festival of the Ecstatic (Melbourne, Australia), Bratislava in Movement (Slovakia), Wexner Arts Center, Dance Place, American Dance Festival, The Yard, MASS MoCA/Jacob’s Pillow, FlynnSpace, Bates Dance Festival, Columbia College, Centre Chorégraphique National de Franche-Comté à Belfort, Festival Rencontres Chorégraphique Internationales de Seine-Saint Denis, Artdanthe Festival, Church, Mount Tremper Arts, and others. Her work has also been supported by National Dance Project (NDP) Production & Touring Grant and Community Engagement Fund from New England Foundation for the Arts; MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation; FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance), a program of the New England Foundation for the Arts in partnership with The Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French American Cultural Exchange; Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, USArtists International; Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists and Emergency Grants; Creative Arts Initiative (CAI); American Dance Abroad; and New Music USA, Live Music for Dance. Bartosik was a 2022 United States Artists Fellowship nominee.

Bartosik’s Encounter projects (2022–24)—a series of intergenerational works for dancers and non-professionals created with local participants in communities around the world—have received funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the Arts; the Nathan M. Clark Foundation; and New York State Council on the Arts. She was an inaugural participant in the 2024 International Choreographers Retreat, organized by Montréal Danse and c.a.t.a.m.o.n Dance Group.

As a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for nine years, Bartosik received a Bessie Award for Exceptional Artistry. She is currently an Advisor for The Ailey School/Fordham BFA Program and teaches at SUNY/Purchase and the Merce Cunningham Trust.