This Is Beautiful – The Public Studio

Overview

Bodies, faces, identities — we all have them, we're all happy with some aspects of them and unhappy with others. This complex relationship we have with ourselves is put under the lens in This Is Beautiful.

The piece has three actors engaging in a soul-searching discourse about identity and body image while eating a banquet on stage.  All the while, behind them a film projection portrays their bodies in transformative ways, beautiful to grotesque and back again.

It comes from The Public Studio, an interdisciplinary company that is the brainchild of Ming-Zhu Hii and Nicholas Coghlan (Secret Life of Us).  Their style, a blend of visual and performance art that sometimes presents as theatre, sometimes as installation, could be a study in complicated identity itself so they should be well suited to taking on the subject matter. Followed by a series of themed short films, this visual feast will surely give you some food for thought.