Theatre Junctions’s ‘Usually Beauty Fails’

Theatre Junction’s presentation of Frederick Gravel’s Usually Beauty Fails is dance and live music and industrial beats that all comes together and fall apart.

The beat swells in the opening and dancers drift across the stage. Don’t be turned off by the volume or the synthetic sound in the first couple pieces of this production because as one sequence blends into the other. Once you get past the dull beginning of Usually Beauty Fails and Frederick Gravel starts speaking to you and invites you to be part of the production, this dance performance starts to warm up.

It become hard edged and rhythmically physical. The dancers throw themselves around the stage in abandon within choreography that is quite impressive. The cast then tries to unite the audience and performers by being vulnerable on stage. They play acoustic guitars and sing while the dancers move from pose to pose. There is an element of improvisation within this production, so it will evolve from performance to performance.

The bones that make up the production will likely remain the same. The sequence where two dancers take off their clothes and touch each other without any sexuality, to the scene where everyone gets dressed up in fancy dresses and suits, pours champagne and sits around watching a couple of solos.

Usually Beauty Fails is a bit experimental and is for a show with a run time of 110 minutes with no intermission has a whole lot of standing around. It does have moments of glorious movement, but a lot of dull waiting for the most part. There isn’t enough of a narrative and frankly enough dancing, to be worth sitting through the whole thing.

Tagged as: Frederick Gravel, theatre junction, Usually Beauty Fails