A Body (Un)Becoming: An Exploration of Materiality through Biomaterials, the Body, and Choreographic Inquiry
Date of Award
5-2026
Document Type
MSU-Only Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
College/School
College of the Arts
Department/Program
Theatre and Dance
Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair
Elizabeth McPherson
Committee Member
Emmanuele Phuon
Committee Member
Parul Shah
Abstract
A Body (Un)Becoming is a performance, installation, and biomaterial research project centered on the transformation of discarded eggshells into hand formed biocomposite materials and kinetic sculptures. Developed as an evening length dance duet in collaboration with dancer Leah Wilks and composer Aaron Gabriel, the work investigates how tactile processes of grinding, mixing, heating, molding, and shaping material into structures can co-form movement inquiries. Through tactile, touch based movement unfolding in slow time, the duet explores the materiality of being human as a sculptural and kinetic process of transformation. Eggshell matter functions as physical material for a site of novel exploration, while acknowledging historical use across cultures in customs and traditions involving fertility, burial rites, love, and protection. Experimentation with forming eggshell dust into repetitive and novel material squares results in the accumulation of thousands of units that create suspended spine-like kinetic sculptures shaping the performance environment. Choreographic research and biomaterial experimentation unfold in parallel. The project emerges from a concern about the widening disconnection between humans and the material world, and a personal desire to expand, balloon-like, the intersections of material transformation as both a dance maker and a biochemist. Rather than seeking to recover a lost connection, the work asks: how might dance emerge directly from material process, and how do bodies and matter continually co-form one another through contact, pressure, and time? Drawing from body-based and environmental artists including Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, and Meg Webster, alongside my dance lineages including Sheri Cohen, Lisa Nelson, Karen Nelson, and Sara Shelton Mann, the project bridges sculptural material practice with embodied improvisational systems rendered into choreographic material. By placing the aging female identified body in dialogue with disintegrating and reforming substances, A Body (Un)Becoming proposes humanness not as a fixed identity but as an ongoing material negotiation shaped through touch, pressure, time, and attention.
File Format
Recommended Citation
Graczyk, Beth, "A Body (Un)Becoming: An Exploration of Materiality through Biomaterials, the Body, and Choreographic Inquiry" (2026). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects. 1664.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/1664
written thesis
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Comments
The performance video is restricted to the Montclair State University community but the PDF file of the thesis, which is located at the bottom of the screen, is available to anyone interested in reading it.