Five open mouths

The mission of Heidi Latsky Dance (HLD) is to redefine beauty and virtuosity through performance and discourse, using performers with unique attributes to bring rigorous, passionate and provocative contemporary dance to diverse audiences. HLD is a New York-based modern dance company. Since its inception in 2001, the company has received numerous awards, commissions and residencies. We premiered in 2001 with a Joyce Theater Residency and our first sold-out run of JUST WATCH!, presented by Danspace Project in NYC. A variety of work followed, at venues around the world including American Dance Festival, Dublin Dance Festival, Central Park Summerstage, Kennedy Center, Scripps College Humanities Institute, DaDaFest Liverpool, Chicago Humanities Festival, CREA Conference Kathmandu, Crossing Borders Festival Dusseldorf, Jacob's Pillow, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and Lincoln Center. http://heidilatskydance.org

Choreographed in collaboration with visual artist-performer Lisa Bufano, a bilateral leg and finger amputee, the solo Five Open Mouths (2007) marks the beginning of Heidi Latsky's development as a disability artist-activist. Here we see her first exploring ways of using the provocative display of physical otherness to reframe dominant perceptions of the disabled body and challenge unmarked [able-ist] aesthetics and cultural ideologies. Comprising five movement tableaux, Five Open Mouths, begins with Bufano in silhouette, posed beside a chair, standing on C-clamp leg prostheses, striking a cyborgian figure. As the lights come up, they reveal her staring back at the audience--a perceptual exchange that interpellates her viewers into the performance and a stare that affirms her own visibility as an act of choice. When, next, she bounds fearlessly about the stage, she is both claiming the space and her body's right to it. The performance unfolds with Bufano seated, stripping away her prostheses to expose the foreshortened contours of her limbs. Lowering herself from the chair, she engages in a lengthy, virtuosic dance that turns increasingly sensual and introspective. The piece concludes with Bufano back in the chair, performing a series of tender unravelling gestures (evocations of her post-surgery removal of bandages) that, accompanied by Cyndi Lauper's ""La Vie en Rose, "" read as a danced ballad to her own radically different body