Beauty Happens
Photos by Alice Chacon
Beauty Happens is an hour long work which explores a spectrum of intimacy and resilience through sight, touch, sound, and relentless physicality.
Influenced by an aviary eight dancers are thrust into a world in which they ask who is the witness and who is witnessed? The framework of the work is born from the construction and simultaneous unraveling of survival systems, most notably researched in the flocking patterns, nesting, and homing mechanisms of birds. At first sparked by infectious rhythms that speak to their primal desires, sensuality, and playful exuberance, the dancers engage in a mating song and dance with themselves. Through touch, a thin line between love and violence, the boundary of bodies collide and identities blur as dancers literally tumble, swirl, catch, and caress.
Moving through sheer exhaustion they have no choice but to strip back the layers of themselves to expose the raw skin beneath their feathers to transform. The work is a test of radical forgiveness and acceptance, of adaptation, and of physical empowerment. It asks questions about individual and group agency and bodily autonomy in this publicly private performance.