Atlas of Being

"Beyond the Rainbow" explores the profound and ever-changing nature of human connection. It delves into the strength of the bonds we forge, how they shape our journey forward, and the tender, inevitable process as some threads gently detach through the passage of time.

There are many practical ways we measure time—clocks, calendars, seasons turning. But when people change, move away, or leave us, those measures can feel inadequate. Love, loss, and distance stretch and compress time in illogical ways.

Kinesthetic anatomist, educator, author, and choreographer Irene Dowd writes, “The nervous system can be perceived by my fingers in the way that the wind can be perceived by the eyes—only indirectly. I see branches moving to the south, but not the north wind that blows them.” Like the wind she describes, time is rarely perceived directly. We do not see it passing; we notice what it moves. A voice no longer heard in a room. A space left open at the table. A gesture the body still remembers. The Wind Reminds Me explores this invisible passage.

Directed by the vulnerable disorientation that occurs as one passes through the many stages of sleep, the dancers gather impulses and memories from their dream travels.

The brain is a red ocean. Within its deep currents, a universe of 100 billion neurons and a constellation of over 100 trillion synaptic connections ripple like waves. This is the most complex object in the known universe—an ever-changing, turbulent sea of thought and emotion. It holds vast, hidden territories where our deepest memories, struggles, and unresolved pain live.

Over and over and over again, replaying that same situation in your head, turning over that stone in your hand—what if, what else, what then? Two steps forward and one step back, hyperfixated, but -- maybe from a different angle. Shift the perspective. Perhaps the right person, just at the wrong time, or perhaps working through is the only way of moving forward.

“There is a crack in everything, that is how the light gets in” – Leonard Cohen. The 2019 Viva—an Italian proclamation of "Celebration"—returns to the stage to prove that the architecture of human emotion is truly timeless. Inspired by Leonard Cohen’s observation, the work navigates the fragile boundary between finality and rebirth, following a man at his lowest ebb into an upside-down world of reinvention.