Pillow Lab:
Joanna Kotze

Joanna Kotze

Developmental Residency | March 5-16, 2025
Invited Showing | March 15, 2025

Joanna Kotze is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, dancer, and educator, active in the New York dance scene since 1998. During her residency at Jacob’s Pillow, Kotze is investigating the phenomenon of history repeating itself through a two-part, unison, non-unison, non-hierarchical, canon dance. The current social and political challenges facing this country and the world at large–a threatened democracy, lack of public health strategy, white supremacist ideology and policy reigning–are nothing new. Yet, with each iteration, new individuals are deeply affected, and are fighting back, applying lived experiential knowledge to the solutions and progress made by generations before. this is the beginning, this is the end, examines–metaphorically through movement –personal, artistic, and historical patterns and how context and time moving forward inherently create change. Performed by an ensemble of 6 dancers and 2 musicians, this work considers these socio-political challenges and the cyclical arc of Kotze’s own artistic history, through cascading waves of intricate and personal movement, holding space for order and chaos, familiar and unfamiliar, building up and tearing down as we move forward.

Kotze is creating this is the beginning, this is the end in collaboration with dancers Lena Engelstein, Wendell Gray II, Molly Heller, Symara Sarai, and Hsiao-Jou Tang, musicians/performers Jennae Santos and Ryan Seaton, and writer-in-residence Lauren Slone. They are in the middle of their process, advancing past research and at the same time generating new material, both physically and sonically.

Kotze’s work—characterized by a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach—presents ways to experience effort, labor, humor, violence, unpredictability, and beauty through movement as well as the body’s relationship to sound, light, and architecture. Her last evening-length piece, ‘lectric Eye, premiered in 2022 at The Space at Irondale in Brooklyn and has been performed at New York Live Arts, the American Dance Festival, and UtahPresents. Joanna received a 2024 Grant to Artists from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a 2013 Bessie Award. Her work has been presented at venues like Jacob’s Pillow, The Yard, Bates Dance Festival, the NAC in Ottawa, and the American Dance Festival, among many others. Kotze has held residencies at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York Live Arts, Jacob’s Pillow, MANCC, and the Bogliasco Foundation, among others. She teaches at Movement Research and has taught at many institutions including The Ailey School, NYU, and The New School. Originally from South Africa, Joanna holds a BA in Architecture from Miami University. To learn more, visit Kotze’s website at joannakotze.com.