RE•GARD

RE•GARD is a collaboration between choreographer and dancer Théa Bautista and photographer 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 title plays on the French word regard—a gaze, a way of seeing—and the English idea of re-garding: looking again. RE•GARD invites both artists and 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.
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For Catherine Walsh, a former ballet dancer turned photographer, 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.
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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—an experience that echoes Catherine Walsh’s own journey. Beyond her perspective as a dancer, Bautista also brings the gaze of an individual moving through society, like anyone else—seen and interpreted differently depending on the language she speaks, the country she is in, the spaces she enters, or the way she looks. As a trilingual, multicultural artist, she often finds that her own sense of self does not always align with how others perceive her. This dissonance fuels her choreographic work, turning the body into a place where inner truth can surface and where identity can be reclaimed, embodied, and seen on her own terms.
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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.​​