The Beginning of Forever

A Trilogy of Three New Works: A Resurgence, A Revelation, A Rebirth.

Three Worlds. Three Moments in Time. Three Aspects of Being.

The Beginning of Forever is a ballet about survival, awakening and renewal – how we endure, how we continue and how, even at the end, we begin again. It traces the experience of life as it touches the hidden inner world of what it means to be human, not as literal reality, but as dance – as feeling, as impression, as dream. At its heart lies the belief that the human journey is a cycle of continual transformation, a rhythm of departure, struggle, and return. Through dance, Resident Choreographer David Dawson gives form to this timeless pattern, each movement a threshold, each breath a beginning.

“In the studio I ask the dancers: don’t wait for the next step, but to become it.”
David Dawson

Part I: The Journey (Life)

The Journey is built on memory and nostalgia. The body remembers everything and transforms it into light. We dance our ‘history’, a form of the ‘sehnsucht’ (an intense yearning). A realm of pulse and possibility, a world unmade and remade with every breath. We witness the promise of life, fragile and fleeting. A place of courage, joy, struggle, hope, with the movement of the body tracing the journey of the heart. Decay is not only about what has been lost; it carries the potential for hope, the idea that we can move beyond the past and imagine a new beginning.

Part II: The Promise (Love)

From the intensity of birth, we move into a realm of memory and longing. This central act focuses on an intimate poetic duet, a ‘zweisamkeit’ (the deep togetherness of a couple), dance entwined in the delicate threads of love, loss, and remembrance. Their story is universal. Dawson explores the courage of vulnerability and the sacredness of connection. The choreography breathes with tenderness, of what we hold and what we cannot keep. Love here is not an escape but a legacy, a resistance to forgetting, a force that moves forward even as time pulls us back. In The Promise, love becomes the heart of the evening, two souls meeting in stillness, discovering that to truly love is to truly see one another. This is love as echo, as sanctuary, as the reason to remember.

Part III:  The Truth (Death)

The final act opens onto a space where ritual and transformation converge. Dance becomes a collective body: rising, dissolving and reforming in sculptural waves of movement. Inspired by cosmic philosophies, both ancient and imagined, this act becomes a meditation on endings as metamorphosis, transformations that birth new beginnings. Death is not an end; it is a truth that sets us free. And from that truth, something stirs again.

“The Beginning of Forever is a collection of dream paintings. With these three new ballets I return to my own beginnings.”
David Dawson

The Beginning of Forever is onstage June 5 – 12, 2027.

About The Beginning of Forever

Top Photo: Artwork by Eno Henze.