visions of beauty
By Heather Kravas
With Andrew Champlin, Tarek Halaby, Michael Helland, John Hoobyar, Michael Ingle, Joey Kipp, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Kayvon Pourazar, Saul Ulerio, and Connor Voss

On the Boards (Seattle) March 30-April 2, 2017
PS122 (New York) January 10-13, 2018

visions of beauty embraces the contradictory as 9 performers demonstrate how bodies trap and free us through a dance of dualistic physical states and morphing structures: rocking, spinning, pumping, lunging. Subtly undermining theatrical conventions, expectations slip exploiting the conflict between control and relinquishment, hope and fear. Choreographic precision collapses into a landscape fleetingly monstrous, powerful, virtuosic, exhausted, mechanical and lush. A conversation between the unnamed and the unearthed, visions of beauty is compulsive, lopsided, angry, funny, frustrating and redemptive.

Considering the theater as a utopia, visions of beauty examines the relationships between art, power, agency and desire. Punk in attitude, feminist in spirit and deliberately anti-spectacle, it is a dance where minimalism clashes with transgressive action. The distilled language is stuttered, repeated, held and abandoned, allowing space for its audience to experience emotion beyond amusement. It aims to produce a revelatory experience where the dance acts as object, the performer as laborer and the audience as judge. Something to be remade and thrown out — it is a dance about itself and the messiness of everything.