SubscribeDonate
HEATHER KRAVAS VISIONS OF BEAUTY

Thu – Sat | Mar 30 – Apr 1 | 8pm
Sun | Apr 2 | 5pm

Friday night post-show conversation with Jenn Joy.

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.

HEATHER KRAVAS

works with choreographic, improvisatory, and collaborative practices to explore the limits of dance as a contemporary form and political force. A 2016/17 Creative Capital Artist and recipient of a 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award, Kravas has had her work presented nationally by American Realness, the Chocolate Factory, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Fusebox Festival, the Kitchen, Movement Research, and Performance Space 122, as well as internationally. As a performer, her varied collaborations include work with Marina Abramovic, DD Dorvillier, Dayna Hanson, Antonija Livingstone, Yvonne Meier and others. Kravas lives in Seattle and was last seen at OtB in 2013 with

the quartet

.

Join us after the show Friday evening for a post-show conversation with Jenn Joy

Jenn Joy is a Critic in Sculpture at Yale School of Art. She founded collective address as a choreographic research space in Brooklyn in 2014. Her book, The Choreographic, was published by MIT Press in October 2014. A Contributing Editor in Performance for BOMB magazine, she also edited Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory and the Global with André Lepecki (Seagull Press, 2009); other writing has been published in DANSE: An Anthology (Les Presses du Réel, 2014), DANCE (Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2012), BOMB, BOMBLOG, Movement Research Performance Journal, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Dance Theatre Journal, Women and Performance, and Contemporary. She was scholar-in-residence at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church in NYC where she co-edited the catalogs Diary of an Image and JUDSONOW and curated Conversations without Walls with Judy Hussie-Taylor a series of conversations regarding contemporary choreography.

visions of beauty is commissioned and supported through the OtB Performance Production Program.

Photos by Alex Escalante

HEATHER KRAVAS VISIONS OF BEAUTY

About the Artist

Heather Kravas

Heather Kravas

Photo courtesy of the artist

Since 1995, Heather Kravas has investigated choreographic, improvisation and collaborative practices in contemporary dance to explore the edges of performance. Her work investigates: lines shapes distances presence exertion intersections endurance calamity contradiction concentration tension failure sacrifice labor love the cobbled together + words Precise and extreme, these dances look like landscapes punctuated by Rube Goldberg machines. Glacial movements give way to strange loops, still forms tremble and transform, DIY folk dances turn into complicated parables. Full of contradictions and emphatically non-spectacular, they invite audiences into the terrain of their own minds. Kravas grew up in Pullman, WA where, under the tutelage of Deirdre Wilson, she studied classical ballet and the experimental theater theories of Jerzy Grotowski. Significant to her understanding of dance as a vital and complex form are the many artists/teachers/colleagues/collaborators she has been privileged to work with/for: Antonija Livingstone, DD Dorvillier, Dayna Hanson, Stephanie Skura, Marina Abramovic, Okkyung Lee, Yvonne Meier, Mary Overlie, Tere O’Connor, Dean Moss, Neil Greenberg, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Rebecca Brooks, among many. A Guggenheim Fellow, Kravas has also received support from Creative Capital, the Doris Duke Impact Award, Foundation for Contemporary Art, MAP Fund, National Performance Network, New England Foundation for the Arts, Seattle Arts Commission, 4 Culture, f.u.s.e.d, Bossack-Heilbron, the Yard, Pact-Zollverein and Performance Works Northwest. Her choreography has been presented at venues including American Realness, Base, Chez Bushwick, The Chocolate Factory, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project @ St.Markʼs, Fusebox Festival, The Kitchen, LMCC, Movement Research, On the Boards, Performance Space New York, Tonic and Velocity Dance Center as well as internationally. Heather currently lives in Seattle, Washington with her partner and 2 kids.

@heatherkravas

Artist page →

visions of beauty is a is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by On the Boards in partnership with Performance Space 122 and NPN.