RE•GARD is a collaboration between choreographer and dancer Théa Bautista and artist Catherine Walsh. This cross-disciplinary project brings together a dance performance and photographic exploration to question how perception shapes what we see as beauty or flaw. The show premiered August 2025 at Gallery 198 in New York.
The title plays on the French word regard—a gaze, a way of seeing—and the English idea of regard: to consider in a certain way. RE•GARD invites both artists and the audience to revisit what we think we know about presence, control, and self-image. It is an inquiry into how we inhabit our own skin, how we expose what we once considered flaws, and how we can be vulnerable with confidence.
For Catherine Walsh, a former ballet dancer turned artist, this work stems from a personal shift away from the perfectionism of classical dance. She is drawn to moments that resist polish—the pause before a movement, the slight collapse after an effort, the unconscious gesture when the camera is forgotten. Her lens seeks not performance, but truth. She was drawn to screen printing for its resonance with dance: a process rooted in repetition, precision, and the ongoing pursuit of a flawless result. Artwork and costumes were made by Catherine Walsh.
Théa Bautista, a choreographer and founder of Althea Dance Company, approaches the project from both personal and artistic perspectives. As a dancer, she has long wrestled with the demand for perfection—an internalized pressure that fuels and frustrates. This project is a way to acknowledge that struggle, and to explore choreography as a site of release, not just discipline. Her work, deeply influenced by questions of identity, presence, and perception, aims to use the body as a space where the invisible becomes visible.
Together, Bautista and Walsh are developing RE•GARD as a layered, intimate dialogue between movement and stillness. It is a project that offers a new lens—one that reclaims imperfection not as lack, but as something profoundly human, worthy of being seen, and of being looked at again.
