Emily Beattie is a contemporary dance artist based in Somerville, MA. Drawing from her rural southern roots, she uses magical realism to engage critique in her dance theater works. Her immersive performances wrap nature and speculative futures into tableaus for performers and audiences to meet somewhere anew. Her entanglements with technology in performance reflect her time spent here in the northeast. Her embodied practice pursues an alchemy of ferocity, ancestral lineage, and heart driven movement.

She’s grateful for the decades of practice and exchange with fellow artists from around the world. Emily is honored to have received grants from the Boston Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, New England Foundation for the Arts and a Somerville Arts Council Fellowship.

Her experimental performance works have been featured at ICA Boston, The Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, SOMArts at the Hive, Earthdance, Waterfire Festival, Stony Brook University, Brown University, Ammerman Center for the Arts at Connecticut College, American Repertory Theater’s Oberon Theater, UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures/Dance department, The Fowler Museum, Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles, The Hammer Museum, and NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Internationally, she has performed at the National School in Quito Ecuador, Renku Poetry Festival in Kyoto, Japan, and the Rhodopi International Theater Lab in Formello, Italy.

She has had the honor of performing in the works of artists David Roussève, Lionel Popkin, Simone Forti, Jennifer Monson, Sarah Rudner, and Michelle Boulè. She holds a BFA from the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and an MFA from UCLA’s department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.

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Project Statement

See | Be Seen is an immersive dance theater performance experience that lays bare the definitions and constructs put upon female presenting bodies in performance by offering the opposite in a radically restful wonderland. Through magical realism and light play See | Be Seen offers both critique and collective remedy.

The trio of performers are obscured inside the large semi-transparent inflatable set piece. It all but excludes the audience. The performers seem to not acknowledge the audience. They seem to be on their own mission. They start to conjure their own energy. They follow their own logic. Their goal is beauty, strength, rest, and celebration- for themselves. They are female identifying and over 40.

During my time in the Dance Lab, I will rebuild the movement landscape of See | Be Seen from the first iteration of the work performed in December 2019 at the Boston Center for the Arts. When it was first made, it felt like an angry reactionary piece and now years later, after staggering international flashpoints and relentless legislation on the female body, the work connects to that anger but this time it is more clean and utilitarian. I know what I want to do with the feeling. We are going to build. We intend to make a space that is overflowingly generative for female identifying people.

Our time in the Dance Lab will let us address some really hard questions such as: Who gets to be free and why? What does freedom look like from the outside? What questions are we avoiding? In addition to those inquiries, See | Be Seen will sit on a foundation of games to spark joy, written movement scores of abundance, and devising radical rest in the performance space. The audience is invited to witness, absorb, and reflect on what their own limitless body can do.