For Kimberly Bartosik, creating work has often meant relying on lineage as much as it has turning away from it. A former dancer with Merce Cunningham who now runs her own company, Kimberly Bartosik/daela, Bartosik is no stranger to jumping between her roots tomore contemporary and experimental movement styles. With her work “I Hunger for You,” an investigative process that began during the 2016 presidential election, Bartosik took this exploration of personal lineage and contemporary culture to the next level to create a work that builds community through deep physicality and an intimate emotional experience.
Bartosik’s Chicago debut of “I Hunger for You” performs at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago Jan 30-Feb 1. The work uses a mix of formal dance styles and raw, impulsive movement to explore the roles of faith, violence, compassion and life force in the everyday lives of Americans living in a divided political and social climate.
After the presidential election in 2016, Bartosik noticed a split in her own North Carolina family between conservative and liberal, religious and political extremes so intense that it destroyed relationships: “It got very hard to talk to each other and it was increasingly hard to talk to somebody, like even a personal family member, who had a different value system,” Bartosik said. “And so I started looking at that as sort of this cultural phenomenon and becoming really disturbed by what was happening in our political landscape that had such a trickle down effect that it was disturbing our personal relationships with people we loved.”
Out of this experience, Bartosik began making a dance to remedy the dysfunction between these different groups of people. She wanted to create an experience that would build community and give audiences something to believe in, without having to tie that belief to religion. In fact, Bartosik made it clear that this piece is not intended to be about religion at all—unless that’s an audience member’s personal interpretation of the work.
“I started thinking about faith in life, faith in another person, having faith in oneself, having faith that you’re going to work out no matter what, and really looking at what it means to believe in something outside of oneself, not necessarily a god,” said Bartosik. “I felt like we had arrived at a place where we deeply needed to connect with each other regardless of our ideologies.”
This deep connection manifests itself in Bartosik’s choreography through its physicality, which she describes as “exhausting, so emotional, so rigorous.” Identifying more as an ideas-based choreographer or director, the movement for the piece developed from a few short phrases that she taught the dancers then had them practice over and over so that she could see where their bodies wanted to take the dancing. For a while, they practiced the piece wearing headphones to help preserve the individuality of each dancer’s role and help preserve the rawness of the intrinsic, pulsating movement that became a significant part of “I Hunger for You.”
“Once I got into the deep physical practice of making the work, there were a lot of ideas that were coming out of our bodies that were like a deep pulse, and that’s where I started thinking about things like ‘life force,’ and things that pulse through us, and things that make us desire to live and desire to communicate and desire to connect.”
The entire audience experience in “I Hunger for You” reflects this experimentation with vulnerability, ferocity and faith. With simple lighting that keeps the seating as visible as the stage--keeping the audience equally as visible as the performers—Bartosik actively tries to expose both audience and dancer, heightening the vulnerability of both those performing and witnessing the choreography. Speakers are positioned right behind the audience, blasting lots of bass, so that the audience can feel the pulse of the music in their bodies and feel physically engaged in the performance.
Bartosik notes that despite the openness of the performance space, “I Hunger for You” is not confrontational. Dancers stay within their own world on stage, committed to the dancing. The audience is empowered to sit, observe and internalize movement that is so rigorous it stirs “uncontrollable feeling” in people. Bartosik mentioned that she often wonders if anyone will feel moved to get up and join the dancers during the performance, but so far, no one has. She attributes this to the reflective way in which the audience members choose to process such a unique emotional experience.
“I feel like people who have witnessed and experienced this work have a deeply personal connection to themselves and their lives while they are in a communal space with other people witnessing this piece,” Bartosik said. “‘I Hunger for You,’ I think, connects to that. It’s really about something personal and beyond yourself too. And it’s really beautiful.”
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“I Hunger for You” performs at 7:30 p.m., Jan. 30-Feb. 1 at at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, 1306 S Michigan Ave. Tickets are $30, available by clicking the event link below.
