Choreographers Ivy Baldwin and Ursula Eagly each create worlds where the adorable and the monstrous coexist, often in the same moment. Meet Cute: Grotesque Ingénue brings these two twisted artists together for a peek at excerpts of some of their creepiest, most charming works. Following the performance, curator Sarah Maxfield leads a discussion with Baldwin and Eagly exploring the artists' fascination with the simultaneous presentation of "beauty" and "the beast."

Ivy Baldwin has been described by the New York Times Magazine as a choreographer who is helping to define an entire generation of choreographers in NYC. Ivy Baldwin Dance is a New York City-based performance company dedicated to the creation of original dance theater. Known for her vivid and wild imagination, Baldwin creates works that are part of an interdisciplinary art form that breaks traditional boundaries and assumptions of theater. Since its inception in 1999, the company has been presented by many theaters, including Dance Theater Workshop, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Dixon Place, Danspace Project, La MaMa E.T.C, and Performance Space 122. Baldwin has received two commissions for new work from Dance Theater Workshop with funds from the Jerome Foundation, a DNA Presents commission from Dance New Amsterdam, two Mondo Cane! commissions from Dixon Place, and commissions for original student work from Barnard College, Iowa State University, North Carolina School of the Arts, and NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She is a recipient of grants from the Puffin Foundation (1999 and 2001), the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation (1999 and 2006), the Dugas Family Foundation (2008), the Trust for Mutual Understanding (2008), and the Karen and William Tell Foundation (2007, 2008, and 2009). Baldwin is a recipient of the 2008 Bogliasco Foundation Jerome Robbins Fellowship in Dance at the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities in Bogliasco, Italy and a 2008 ArtistNe(s)t Residency at the George Apostu Cultural Center in Bacau, Romania. Baldwin received a commission from Dance Theater Workshop's Commissioning and Creative Residency Program for her newest work Bear Crown, which premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in March 2009.

Ursula Eagly makes bizarre performances full of darkness, humor, and other contradictions. Eagly's work has been commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop's Studio Series and Fresh Tracks, and the Howl Fesitval. It has also been presented by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Chocolate Factory Theater, Danspace Project (DraftWork), Movement Research at the Judson Church, the Old American Can Factory, Performance Space 122 (AvantGardeArama, Schoolhouse Roxx), and Ur. Nationally, her work has been presented by DiverseWorks in Houston, Texas and The Gilded Pony Festival in Troy, New York. She has received two individual artist grants from the Queens Council on the Arts and space grants from Topaz Arts and Ur. Eagly graduated from Princeton in 1999 with the Francis LeMoyne Page Theater Award for Excellence in Dance and the Class of 1955 Grant for her senior thesis in dance.

Sarah Maxfield is the curator of THROW, an ongoing works-in-progress discussion series at the Chocolate Factory Theater and has curated evenings for Danspace Project's Food For Thought and Performance Space 122's Schoolhouse Roxx. Maxfield is also the founder/director of Red Metal Mailbox, a New York City-based dance-theater company, which has been presented by Dixon Place, Performance Space 122 (Homeroom Series), Dance Theater Workshop (40Forward), the Chocolate Factory Theater, and Galapagos Art Space, among other venues in NYC, as well as at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and the Metcalf Experimental Theater in Illinois. In addition, Maxfield has written about performance for the Movement Research Performance Journal, as well as online journals Culturebot, Critical Correspondence, and Culture Catch. She currently writes online for The Inquisitive Owl.

Banner image: photograph by Gus Powell