Show Finder

Megan Williams Dance Projects (MWDP) presents 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 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. 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?”