Mission

Kimberly Bartosik/daela is a diverse ensemble of performers and designers working under the artistic leadership of choreographer Kimberly Bartosik. Working collaboratively, we create emotionally riveting performance projects that are built upon the development of a virtuosic movement language and the creation of highly theatricalized environments. 

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Artist Statement

I am a choreographer, writer, and teacher. My body of performance work includes viscerally provocative, ferociously intimate projects illuminating my belief that artistic practice can deepen our understanding of the world around us and that the physical body is the most potent form of communication.

 

As an artist within the lineage of Merce Cunningham, for whom I danced for 9 years, I embrace his dedication to bold innovation and pushing form to radical extremes, but I have also spent decades resisting his belief that the world outside the studio stays outside. In my work, I carve out space for criticism and compassion while tenderly and violently etching away at some deeply distressing threads of our society. I use the body—in all its physical and emotional extremes—to invite audiences to think, feel, and reflect on their place within their complicated existence. Embracing the physical and emotional extremes of my performers, their bodies become vessels through which ideas, emotion, context, and content flow directly into the audience body.

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My process focuses on rigorous research towards achieving intense energetic states, which, pushed to an extreme, result in a breaking down of form, leaving the body in a raw, deeply human state. This play with power and vulnerability is the core of my process and a conduit to the audience's perception of themselves within their greater worlds.

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While my work values the unique contributions of highly trained professional performers, since 2018, I have also welcomed an intergenerational and community focus - emerging with I hunger for you (BAM Next Wave), developing further with through the mirror of their eyes (2020 Bessie Honoree Outstanding Production), and deepening with The Encounter (2021-24). Often featuring young, untrained performers -including my child- I have highlighted ways that their presence illuminates the queries: How do we see the world when we encounter a young person seeing it, unfiltered? How do they act as reminders that we can never become immune to what they are seeing/witnessing? How do they become the bridge between the audience and trained performers, allowing us to see ourselves in and through them?

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In my recent work, bLUr (2025-ongoing), two young design artists sculpt the space onstage with handheld lights, defining how we encounter the world we/they are witnessing onstage. This deeply human perspective supports the audience's myriad of emotions that the performers conjure, and allows a collective reckoning with the layers of grief, desire, hope and despair we are carrying in our bodies.

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