SALT HORSE is a performance company created by dancers Beth Graczyk and Corrie Befort and musician Angelina Baldoz.

Salt Horse is a Seattle-based dance/sound performance company that creates visually rich, sensation-based works that illuminate the quiet, unseen, or hidden aspects of nature and the human experience. The company members rigorously merge improvisation and composition to create arresting narratives that weave between the literal and the abstract.  Their works invite an audience to pass through states of uncertainty and recognition - mysterious landscapes that reveal familiar narratives.

    “Startlingly funny, terrifying, disorienting and full of an unnamed grief and longing that was visceral and deeply moving.”
                                                                                                                                                                                         - Emily Stone

Now a resident company in Seattle's Washington Hall, Salt Horse was formed through a series of residencies and performances in Japan and Seattle between 2005 and 2008. 

Visit the Works page for piece descriptions, Galleries for images and video, the Artists page for complete biographies and the Calendar for a listing of past and upcoming performances.  Scroll down to read more about the group’s approach.




















Salt Horse concocts pieces that oscillate between the dark and strange and the beautiful and poetic, always infused with a twist of humor. While their critically acclaimed stage and video effects are carefully constructed to disrupt the audience's perceptions, their richly layered sound and detailed, full-bodied dancing invite imaginative engagement. 

The company's founding artists bring an unusual range of talents to Salt Horse. Graczyk is a published biochemist as well as a much sought-after dancer, appearing in over 30 works, performing both nationally and internationally. Befort is a commissioned choreographer and award-winning filmmaker whose films screen worldwide. Baldoz is a locally celebrated trumpet player who tours nationally as a bassist and vocalist in a rock band and has scored a feature-length film and numerous live works.

Befort and Graczyk’s choreography continually oscillates the audience’s visual attention from expansive, full-body textures and complex spatial patterning to small, detailed and evocative gestures. Some of Seattle's most distinctive performers have been cast in larger work. The choreography emerges from image or scenario based improvisational structures that require the creation of very specific physicalities.  For example: “You have birds in your head” or “the room is disintegrating.”

Baldoz's music, created simultaneously with the choreography, scores all the physical images. Played live, Baldoz’s music spans highly structured melodic song, electronic textures, crashing of tin pans and water sounds to create a diverse sonic topography.

As performers Salt Horse has been described as having an “amazingly raw stage presence and vulnerability that is etched with virtuosic articulation.” (Sean Ryan, OTB)

Salt Horse often employs scenic "magic tricks" in their works. These arise from a desire to disrupt the audience's expectations in a way that invites them to question how they are perceiving what they are experiencing.  It is a tool to open up the audience's imagination, and empower them to make choices in how they interpret the work. 

Salt Horse was first created through an intense period of travel and exchange between Japan and Seattle. They intentionally sought the heightened awareness that displacement fosters as the source from which Salt Horse would emerge.