Megan Williams Dance Projects Presents Smile, Though your Heart is Aching

Megan Williams Dance Projects (MWDP) will give the World Premiere of Smile, though your heart is aching, choreographed by Megan Williams to music composed by Eve Beglarian. 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 14^th 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?”