Megan Williams Dance Projects Presents The World Premiere Of SMILE, THOUGH YOUR HEART IS ACHING This April

Megan Williams Dance Projects will present the World Premiere of Smile, though your heart is aching, choreographed by Megan Williams to music composed by Eve Beglarian, April 5, 6, and 7, 7:30 P.M., at the James and Martha Duffy Performance Space at Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, New York. 

The evening length work is set to Beglarian's anthology, Machaut in the Machine Age (1986-2024), a series of responses to the secular songs of 14th century composer/poet Guillaume de Machaut. The work features ten dancers accompanied live by six musicians, including Beglarian on vocals, keyboard, and toy piano. Performers include Esmé Julien Boyce, Robert Mark Burke, Réka Echerer, Mary Lyn Graves, Chelsea Enjer Hecht, Justin Lynch, Mykel Marai Nairne, Will  Nolan, Michael Bryan Wang, and Williams. Musicians include Beglarian, Tristan Kasten-Krause (bass), Margaret Lancaster (flute), Isabelle O'Connell (piano), Caitlin Cawley (percussion), and Lukas Pappenfusscline (vocals).

In Machaut in the Machine Age, Beglarian  pushes at the norms of gendered behavior, queering medieval mores into the 21st century. Williams draws on the themes embedded in the music, in which hope, desire, love, possession, consent, perseverance, and loss are in dialogue, creating a lush and intimate movement landscape that falls in and out of classical form and poses the question: “How do we find joy, pleasure, rhythm, and momentum when things around us and within us are in a constant state of upheaval?”

Costumes for Smile, though your heart is aching are by Claire Fleury, with lighting by Kathy Kaufman, and sound design by Florian Staab.

Tickets

Smile, though your heart is aching will be given three performances, April 5, 6, and 7. The James and Martha Duffy Performance Space at Mark Morris Dance Center is located at: 3 Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. To purchase tickets, please visit Megan Williams Dance Projects/Tickets.

About Megan Williams Dance Projects

Megan Williams Dance Projects was founded in 2016 with the mission of interrogating and elevating the human experience through the research, creation, production, and performance of contemporary dance works. Williams was the DANCE NOW Commissioned Artist in 2018, premiering her first full evening work, One Woman Show to great acclaim at Joe's Pub in NYC and hailed as “whip-smart and vastly entertaining” (Deborah Jowitt for ArtsJournal). Recent projects include a 2023 commission for the Rye Arts Center ( Rye, NY) , a large installation project at the Katonah Museum of Arts (Katonah , NY), and the Dance Off the Grid series at the Emelin Theater in Mamaroneck, N.Y.  For more info: Megan Williams Dance Projects

About Megan Willliams

Megan Williams is an independent dance artist, choreographer, in demand teacher and repetiteur. Her choreography has been produced throughout the United States. After graduating from the Juilliard School and dancing in the companies of Ohad Naharin, Laura Glenn, and Mark Haim, she joined the Mark Morris Dance Group, dancing for 10 years, touring worldwide, creating roles in seminal works, and appearing in the films Falling Down Stairs (with Yo Yo Ma), The Hidden Soul of Harmony, The Hard Nut, and Dido and Aeneas. Her dancing with MMDG was named “an unusual blend of delicate precision and sensuous fluency…with considerable strength and profound musicality.” (Tobi Tobias for New York Magazine). Williams continues her affiliation with Morris as guest teacher, guest rehearsal director, and as an international stager of his works. She was a 2019 Choreographic Initiative Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts (NYU) and is currently serving on the dance faculties of the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College, SUNY, Marymount Manhattan College, and Sarah Lawrence College (where she is an MFA alumna).

About Eve Beglarian

 

According to the Los Angeles Times, composer and performer Eve Beglarian is a “humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” A 2023 winner of the Arts and Letters Award for “a spectacular body of work that innovates and takes enormous risks,” she is also a 2017 winner of the Alpert Award in the Arts for her “prolific, engaging and surprising body of work,” and has been awarded the 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Prize from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts for her “innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation.” Her current projects include a solo piano piece about Emily Dickinson responding to Ives' Concord Sonata for the pianist Donald Berman, a project about Native-Settler relations growing from her replication by bicycle of an exploratory trip of the Great Lakes made by Henry Schoolcraft in 1820, and a piece for 24 basses in a grove of trees, composed for Robert Black and friends. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days, “a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress…an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.” (Los Angeles Times). Beglarian's chamber, choral, and orchestral music has been commissioned and widely performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the American Composers Orchestra, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the California EAR Unit, loadbang, Newspeak, the Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, and individual performers including Maya Beiser, Lara Downes, Lucy Dhegrae, and Thomas Feng. Recordings of Eve's music are available on ECM, Koch, New World,  Canteloupe, Innova, Naxos, Kill Rock Stars, CDBaby, and Bandcamp. https://evbvd.com/

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