COIL 2017 Festival: "Custodians of Beauty" by Pavel Zuštiak / Palissimo (NYC) Dance
Company:
Pavel Zuštiak / Palissimo (NYC) Dance
Custodians of Beauty
Pavel Zuštiak / Palissimo (NYC) Dance, Performance Copresented with La MaMa
La MaMa, The Downstairs, 66 East 4th Street in Manhattan
Jan 5 at 8pm, Jan 6 at 5pm, Jan 7 at 5:30pm, Jan 8 at 2pm
85 minutes
$20
“Plunges headlong into questions about what is ‘beautiful’ by interrogating sources like Plato, Pope Benedict XVI, and of course, the dancing body.” – Time Out New York
For decades in the humanities, various arguments have been put forward against beauty. Where do we find beauty today and does it need our defense? Bessie Award–winning choreographer/director Pavel Zuštiak and his Palissimo Company examine beauty and its intrinsic relationship with art through minimalist movement, sensuous abstraction and potent stage imagery. Drawn from a dark Eastern European dancetheater aesthetic, this richly postmodern dance/live music event casts the human body as a sculptural form, an emotional trigger, or a political symbol. In an age when humanity, disenchanted with itself, seems to have rejected the necessity of beauty, Custodians of Beauty asks us to look again, beyond the surface, to see differently.
Pavel Zuštiak is a NYC-based director, choreographer and performer, born in the communist Czechoslovakia and trained at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. His works for stage and public spaces merge the abstract aspects of dance with nonlinear qualities of “theatre of images” into multidisciplinary pieces rich in evocative imagery and piercing emotional resonance. Zuštiak is the 2015 Bessie Juried Award winner for his “poetic layering of movement and visual imagery, conceiving the stage space as a decentralized world in which the corporeal body is the focus and canvas for a wide range of human expression,” a 201517 Princeton Arts Fellow, the recipient of 2013 LMCC President's Award for Excellence in Artistic Practice and 2012 NEFA/NDP Production and Residency Grants, 2010 Guggenheim Fellow and 2014, 2009, and 2007 Princess Grace Awards Winner. His 5hour trilogy The Painted Bird received a 2013 Bessie Award nomination for Outstanding Production.
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