Choreography
I learned how to make work in an architecture studio. I began graduate school in 1992, and after the first year I was ready to quit; that summer I made my first piece of skating choreography and understood that the studio was what had taught me how to design one. I went back to school eager to learn more.
The way I make work has changed. For most of those years I used improvisation to generate material and then learned it back meticulously from video clips, gathered across different practice days and put together until the piece was set. The last piece made that way was It’s Me or You, Let’s Go! It Could Be Worse and Afternoon of a Faun are structured improvisations, and Thinking About Ukraine, made in four days for a fundraiser, was the first.
That came out of taking improvisation classes with Melisabel. A friend brought me to her class telling me I would love it. I did, and I was a regular student for several years; we later worked together on Cosas que sé que no son verdad. As my own improvisation practice developed, and my time filled up, I could no longer bring myself to set pieces the way I had before.
What follows is thirty years of it, newest first.
Afternoon of a Faun · October 2025 · World Figure & Fancy Skating Championships, Lake Placid
A solo for the fancy skate, to Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, on ice dark enough to hold a reflection. It took the silver.
Lake Placid, 2025
Watch Afternoon of a Faun · Elizabeth Fisher, Fancy Skating Deep Dive: Beth Woronoff, 2025, Art of Skating — an article about the piece, with the interview embedded in it.
It Could be Worse, 18 June 2024 · Galerías Mérida
Skated to three excerpts by Laurie Anderson, on the rink at Galerías Mérida — a sheet of ice inside a shopping centre in the Yucatán.
The skirt was a ploy. A traditional skating audience expects tricks and complicated choreography; I gave them serenity and simplicity instead, and the magic of the cloth was a palate cleanser. It let me take them with me on a crazy ride into a land they never imagined. A woman on the run — not from someone, but going somewhere — on a wild and almost comic ride.
The first part ends with the skirt coming off. The second goes down into the lower levels: a rhythmic, driving heartbeat, the movement complex and unpredictable. It ends in a headstand. In the third the captain announces that we are all going down, and I rise out of the headstand uncaring, uncomplaining, aware of the danger and daring to party through it — maniac and persistent, running across the ice as my metaphorical plane crashes. It could be worse.
The skirt itself is fifteen years older than this piece. I made it for Flight in 2009, to Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, and that piece ends by taking it off. I put it back on to skate here, at Galerías Mérida, in June 2024. The year after that I used the skirt as a blue screen: the Improbable Outcomes paintings are keyed into the cloth, so they move with it across the ice, and that became the film for the opening.
It’s Me or You, Let’s Go! · 2023 · Lake Placid, 8–12 October
To music by Meredith Monk. It took the bronze at Lake Placid, and I skated it again that year at the XI Gay Games in Guadalajara.
Lake Placid, 2023.
Thinking About Ukraine · 28 May 2022 · Twin Rinks, Connecticut · the first piece I improvised
My Odyssey · 2021 · World Figure & Fancy Skating Championships
To Redi Hasa’s Dajti Mountain, from The Stolen Cello.
The ice shows the figures from the past days. Music by Redi Hasa, Dajti Mountain.
Still to come: the 2021 result, and whose channel this video is on — if it is World Figure Sport’s, Karen has to approve the frames; if it is yours, she doesn’t.
Beethoven · 2019 · World Figure & Fancy Skating Championships
Choreographed with David Brown, to a Beethoven piano concerto. The ice by then held a whole championship of traced figures, and the piece is skated across them.
Gambol · 2018 · World Figure & Fancy Skating Championships
To Pachelbel’s Canon, choreographed with David Brown. My first year of competition, and the silver in the fancy skate.
Across the patterned competition ice
Flight · 2009
A solo to Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel — mirror in the mirror. It is about vanity and aging, the ephemeral state of the body: being drawn into your own reflection, and then giving the mirror away. I handed it to someone in the audience. What was left was taking off the great skirt — a delicate dance, free of what we put on to impress the world. A shedding of the butterfly wings, a dressing down to the raw soul.
I made the skirt for this piece. The prototype was teal and I sewed it myself. When I described what I wanted — a large floating skirt — to my then husband, Tim Ganon, he saw the problem straight away: the cloth would tangle on the ground and I would trip on it. He suggested thin metal strips he had from an industrial plumbing router tool, so that the cloth would stay spread and be able to float. The ribbing was fixed to a belt and the cloth went over it. That first skirt tore at the bottom, where the metal poked through. The final one was sewn by a good friend and supporter, Sybil Miller, with rubber caps for the metal to sit in and much thicker fabric.
I performed Flight many times, and not always the same way. In one version I changed the costume and wore a long black wig — like Moira’s hair. I skated it several times at the New Works and Young Artists concerts at Riverbank State Park.
Six Arcs of a Circle · 1997 · and Lightness · 1995
Six Arcs of a Circle. A thirty-minute ballet on ice in six parts, to the preludes of Bach’s cello suites. Made as Artist in Residence at Chelsea Piers — the residency gave me free ice for rehearsals and a performance we charged admission for. The program didn’t continue after that year. The first part was called Majesty and Opacity. The Ice Theatre of New York ensemble later skated sections of it.
The set designed as a band of panels
Eight feet high, modelled at quarter-inch scale, with colour notes and light from the front and from behind.
Lightness. To the second prelude of Bach’s cello suites — the second part. One thread that unravels from beginning to end, the way an Escher morphs from birds to reptiles to fish. It came first; two years later it became one of the six parts of Six Arcs of a Circle, and went on being performed on its own.
The skaters’ movement traced from footage, in one continuous line.
Bach’s second prelude from the cello suites, noted down.
Lightness documented — the pattern the skaters leave, written down. Skaters do this to know where on the ice they are going, and to remember the steps. Scaled: 6′8″.
Photograph: Jay Colton. Credit him wherever it appears.
A movement drawing of the spread eagle as it wafts in a circle. The outline of the skater’s body is drawn multiple times to indicate the importance of the sweep of a movement.
Made in 1995, my second group work on the Ice Theatre of New York ensemble: a soloist, a chorus of five women, and a couple — Julia Speiser and John Wright. It is my version of a movement language built from Graham’s emotionally suggestive contractions and her distinct shapes. A woman sees her lover betray her with another woman; the chorus of women embody her emotions and the voice of morality. The group version was performed only twice; I skated it as a solo for years afterward.
Watch the ensemble version · the solo at Rockefeller Center, in the snow
“Ms. Woronoff’s Red, a solo in which she glided exultantly.”
Jack Anderson, reviewing Ice Theatre of New York’s free lunchtime performances at the Rockefeller Plaza rink, “Elegance With Some Eccentricity”, The New York Times, 2 February 1996.
Credits
- Nine years as a company member and soloist with Ice Theatre of New York, founded by Moira North.
- Taught the company’s Saturday Morning Apprentice Program at Sky Rink alongside Moira North and Rob McBrien — thirty-five participants, aged six to sixty, skating at Rockefeller Plaza in April and at Sky Rink in June.
- Works by Laura Dean, Ann Carlson, David Dorfman and Rob McBrien; Black Ice (1994), to Ernest Bloch, a duet built on Beth and Douglas Webster by Donlin Foreman, a Martha Graham principal — there is video of it; a solo created on her by Lar Lubovitch. Three years of class with John Curry, the 1976 Olympic champion.
- Two group works made on the ensemble: Dream Remember, the first, and Red. The company later skated sections of Six Arcs of a Circle.
- The New Choreographers Project, a program for ensemble members to develop their own dance ideas and set them on the company. Dream Remember was the first work made in it.
- Taught the floor work that opened Ice Theatre’s summer classes, out of her Martha Graham training, and led the Saturday morning workshops on the ice. Taught the company’s workshops at Bridgewater, New Jersey, where her classes worked on internal motivation — prowling circles across the ice, with the students holding their own body control.
- Created and found funding for two Ice Theatre of New York programs: the New Works and Young Artists Series and the Sports and Arts in Schools skating program. The New Works and Young Artists Series is still running: it is in Ice Theatre’s 2022–23 season review, thirty years on.
- New Works and Young Artists — funded through the City of New York: free rehearsal ice at the new Riverbank rink in Harlem in exchange for performances for the neighborhood schools, each followed by a lesson taught by the skaters.
- 1996 Artist in Residence Choreography Grant, Sky Rink at Chelsea Piers. 1997 Lawrence Epstein Choreography Award.
- Twice featured on Diamond Dance Views, Linda Diamond’s dance program out of Woodstock.
- Beth Woronoff: Dancing Ice Skater — a 54-minute documentary by Linda Diamond, recorded at the Seven21 Media Center and catalogued in 2013. It carries excerpts of Fire & Ice, Viva La Vida: the Life of Frida Kahlo, Volcano and Persephone & the Birth of Winter, with Beth speaking about the form. Held at the University of Southern California, where the libraries’ dance guide lists it under Choreographers and Choreography. OCLC 880918131.
- Frozen Feet Theater — Co-Artistic Director and Choreographer from 2010, with Mike Carson of Innovative Arts. Persephone & the Birth of Winter, 2011.
- Guest artist with Ice Theatre of New York again in 2022–23, teaching the Master Edge Classes and the adult edge classes from September through June.
- In development: The Famished Road, after Ben Okri.