Katarína Krupičková & Florentina Ebenbauer To Beauty Behold

The solo performance To Beauty Behold explores how grief, celebration, and acceptance can coexist in one space and within one person. Movements shift between contorted and light, moving from sadness and fragility to rage and anger, anger and humour. An orange fruit, symbolising childhood and nostalgia, connects the past and the present. A performer travels through space with shifting intentions and emotions, tracing how grief feels, where it resides, and how it moves through the body.

What happens when grief becomes too vast for the body to contain? To move through it is to enter uncharted waters, searching for what cannot be understood from a distance. Was there a moment you missed? Is there a way of becoming that allows you to stay close to what you have lost?

‘Vždy mi na čelo nakreslila krížik, keď sme sa lúčili.’
‘She’d always draw a cross on my forehead before saying goodbye.’

The title To Beauty Behold comes from a saying: to behold beauty is to recognise that you yourself embody the beauty – and its measure – you see in the world. You hold it in your eyes and in your heart, in the way your gaze shapes perception. You hold beauty in your hands as they gently touch the faces of others. 

‘Vždy keď vidím niečo nádherné, spomeniem si na teba.’
‘Every time I see something beautiful, I think of you.’

To carry beauty is to carry dreams, wishes and fragile hopes, like the wish made while blowing away a fallen eyelash – here and alive, until you are not. And when loss arrives, when someone deeply loved disappears, a storm rises. What remains is to feel all that you’re feeling, letting it race through you like lightning and thunder dancing in the sky.

Grief shifts form – from devouring heaviness to rage, from brutality into celebration, into sparks of life itself, into the joy of dance and movement. The body goes through it all, bone-and-marrow deep, hands soaked in blood and tears. The self transforms into the version that has walked and run through struggle and pain. You can’t skip a step, can’t skip a stone; for the only way is head-on and through.

‘When I say you, who I really mean is me.’