I have been thinking a lot about beauty these days
Not just what is beautiful, but what happens inside us when we encounter beauty—and what happens when we begin trying to become it? And what are all the ways we do not even think of as something beautiful, but it is..
That question became the starting point for BEAUTY, a dance work that moves through the many ways we experience, construct, pursue, distort, judge, consume, and ultimately inhabit beauty.
BEAUTY begins with lizards—primordial creatures moving precariously through space, evolving, becoming. Before mirrors. Before judgment. Before the idea of beauty exists.
Then we become human.
We touch our faces. We sculpt ourselves. We arrange, adorn, extend, refine. We make beautiful lines. We fall. We fix. We repeat. We reach for perfection—and sometimes push it so far that the beautiful becomes strange, distorted, even uncomfortable.
The dancers shed layers.
They touch. They hold. They support. They gather.
They play.
They struggle.
They laugh.
They are watched—and they watch one another.
Because beauty can be seductive, but it can also become a performance. A way of presenting ourselves for approval, admiration, or consumption.
What happens when we let that go?
What remains when there is nothing left to add?
Perhaps beauty is not the perfect line, the perfect face, the perfect body.
Perhaps it is the life force underneath all of it.
The curve of a spine.
A hand finding another hand.
A body surrendering to gravity.
A breath.
A fall.
A laugh.
A moment of stillness inside movement.
Beauty as connection.
Beauty as impermanence.
Beauty as pleasure.
Beauty as truth.
And finally, the possibility of being seen without being evaluated.
Not admired.
Not consumed.
Not made into an image.
Just seen.
And found beautiful.
Exactly as we are.
Sharing some photos from our September 9th performance at Landmark on Main Street in Port Washington, LI.
VG/DE was excited to preview the work to an enthusiast audience with a post performance talk back.
Save the date for the premiere of Beauty at Live Arts: February 11-13, 2027!