Joanna Kotze

I was born in South Africa and emigrated to the US when I was young; I studied ballet and then architecture and contemporary dance; I have an ongoing career as a performer in other choreographers’ work. All of this has shaped me as a person and an artist.

The subject matter of my work merges with the persistent questions that guide my work: How do we inhabit space together? How do we continue to push our capacities for change? Each process is rooted in these questions and what shifts in each piece is who is in the room and how we respond to the current social and political moment. I cultivate relationships over time, creating scenarios for movement, collaboration, emotions, and questions to emerge while pushing the limits of the body’s architecture. Each role becomes a way for the performer to access rigor, power, vulnerability, and individuality.

Physical, emotional, and artistic spectrums - order to chaos, humor to violence, intimacy to isolation - play a big role in my investigations and manifestation of movement. Relationship to the viewer - how the space is arranged, where viewers are seated and how the performer relates to audience members - is crucial to each piece that I create. Collaboration is key to my process. My deep relationships with dancers, visual artists, composers, poets, lighting and costume designers are cultivated over many years and often across several projects. I am interested in the doing, the potential for failure, the vulnerability of being in an unknown place, to allow for a unique physicality and world to emerge.

Joanna Kotze is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, dancer, and educator who has been part of the New York dance community since 1998. Through a collaborative, multi-disciplinary process, she creates highly physical dance performances that present ways to look at effort, labor, humor, violence, unpredictability, and beauty through movement and the body’s relationship to sound, light, physical materials, and space.

Kotze’s evening-length piece, ‘lectric Eye (2022), responds to collective and personal loss and isolation—drawing attention to the human body’s potential for persistence, resistance, and power. It was developed from 2018 to 2022, and premiered at The Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, NY, before touring. 

As part of her research, Kotze made three other independent projects that investigate the themes and movement from ‘lectric Eye research. Among these is BIG BEATS which premiered in September 2021 at Pier I in Riverside Park, New York, NY. An outdoor performance danced by a large group and viewed from all sides, BIG BEATS has been performed by six different casts and presented in six different communities nationwide. Her film, Nothing’s changed except for everything (2022), which screened at film festivals around the world, was created in collaboration with Ryan Seaton (sound) and Chris Cameron (cinematography), and featured one dancer. Lastly, Kotze collaborated with writer Lauren Slone on a book that includes observations, reflections, and creative writing about the process of making ‘lectric Eye. All three projects use the connection between music and movement to push physical and sonic limits, both collectively and as individuals.

Kotze’s work has also been shown at the American Dance Festival, Durham, NC; UtahPresents, Salt Lake City, UT; the National Arts Centre, Ottawa, Canada; Velocity Dance Center, Seattle, WA; Bates Dance Festival, Lewiston, ME; New York Live Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and Danspace Project, in New York; and other distinguished venues. Kotze has performed with many notable choreographers including Wally Cardona, Kimberly Bartosik, Stacy Spence, Annie-B Parson, Donna Uchizono, Tendayi Kuumba, Netta Yerushalmy, Kota Yamazaki, Sam Kim, and others.

Kotze has been recognized with a Nathan M. Clark Foundation Grant (2022), was awarded the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Fellowship (2021 and 2020), received two Jerome Foundation Grants (2016 and 2014), and was awarded the New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer (2013). Kotze received her B.A. in Architecture from Miami University.