Edgar Allan Poe | Why Beauty Is Not Pretty

There’s a particular kind of dance that floats effortlessly, limbs delicate, faces serene, costumes pristine. It’s the kind of beauty that gets applause—and then is forgotten. I’m not interested in that.

As a choreographer, I’ve come to believe that beauty, if it’s real, must carry weight. It must speak to the world as it is. That doesn’t mean despair—it means honesty. The body remembers what history often forgets. And if we’re going to ask audiences to sit still and watch, we’d better make it worth their attention, their presence, their vulnerability.

Much of today’s choreography is built around ideas. Concepts. Themes. And while abstraction has its place, it often leaves the body out of the equation. We trade specificity for cleverness. We trade witness for spectacle. But a dance that won’t hold grief, or rage, or doubt, or faith—that’s not beauty. That’s avoidance.

In my own work, I start with breath. With bone. With women who’ve buried children. With men who’ve walked away from the church and are aching to return. With the questions we’re too afraid to speak aloud. The movement builds from there. It’s not decorative—it’s necessary.

The pressure to be “pretty” is especially strong in ballet. The tradition idolizes women while rarely listening to them. It rewards lines, but not story. It praises discipline, but not doubt. As a Mexican-American woman in leadership, I don’t take that legacy lightly. I want to inherit the craft—but I also want to confront its silence.

Dance, at its best, is a kind of prayer. Not the polite kind. The kind where someone cries out and the heavens don’t answer. Or maybe they do, but not in the way we expected. That’s the kind of beauty I’m chasing. The kind that doesn’t perform for praise, but bears witness to something holy.

When I choreograph, I’m not interested in making the audience feel comfortable. I want them to see themselves—maybe in ways they hadn’t planned. I want them to carry the performance with them into the grocery store, the voting booth, the family dinner they’re dreading. If they talk about it a week later, if they’re haunted in the best way, then we’ve done our job.

We need dance that remembers. Dance that opens. Dance that calls something out of us.

Pretty won’t do.