JULIA RAE ANTONICK
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
We are all bodies, sensorially thirsty and alive.
Being brains and bowels, beautiful, intelligent, flawed and fleeting.
My work uses somatic explorations of the body and constructions of environment to suspend and disrupt the pathways of perception and response. I choreograph graceful immersions as a functional invitation to heal the Cartesian split and question what is being consumed.
I consider all facets of the theatrical experience and prioritize the severe care the audience deserves to allow for the visceral consent necessary to enter into a challenging re-contextualization, unlatching from the world we are all complicit in.
Rooting down the audience in the safety of creature comforts while pushing them off the shore of assumptions, this space between perception and response is where we have the agency to re-sort our experience. Actively participating in the logic and structures of this eerily familiar foreignness, engaging the act of memory evolution in an abstracted expanse of deliberately crafted mess, we practice how we want to participate in our daily lives.
I make dance as a facilitator for change.
I present bodies because that’s who you are.
BIO
Julia Rae Antonick is a contemporary choreographer and dancer whose movement reflects a digestion of contemporary, modern and classical dance forms from American, European and Indonesian roots. Her choreography emphasizes the creation of worlds the audience can enter, disrupting ingrained patterns of attention and reawakening a viewer to a language of kinetics, filigree and somatically informed partnering work. Julia has been immersed in an ongoing collaboration with Jonathan Meyer and Joe St.Charles for over a decade. With Meyer, she has served as Artistic/Executive Director for Khecari since 2010. Julia graduated from the Chicago Academy for the Arts with the Dance Department’s Award of Excellence and received her BFA in dance from CalArts. Antonick has been awarded choreographic residencies at Djerassi, Ragdale, Hambidge, Links Hall, The Chicago Cultural Center, Centrum, Trillium was chosen for NEFA’s Regional Dance Development Initiative, Links Hall’s Touring project, Mordine&Co.’s Emerging Artist Program, Korespoondance’s Fillimit and presented at The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, DancePlace in DC, Yates Gallery in Chicago, and will be presented at The Kohler Arts Center in 2025. She has received grants from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Illinois Arts Council, The Chicago Seminar on Dance and Performance, Driehaus, Donnelley, Cheney and Logan foundations, was awarded a the Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Grant for 2010, has been one of NewCity’s best choreographers and top 50 players and a nominee/honorable mention for the 3Arts award and USA Artist Fellowship. Julia has been a mentor/outside eye for Links Hall’s LinkUp and CoMission residencies, has served on the Anti-Racist Team for Chicago Dancemakers Forum since 2021, taught at Hubbard Street’s Lou Conte Dance Studios and Columbia College, and is an artist in residence at Indian Boundary Cultural Center through Khecari and the Arts Partners in Residence program.
