My friends and I were sitting in one our favorite hangouts, Lupa—which is sadly no more. When we are all there we often take up the entire length of the bar. Having grown up in a family with seven children, this feels very familiar to me. Well, not the wine bar, and not sitting at the bar, but having seven animated conversations going on simultaneously. A little ribbing, a little laughing and even the occasional dance break. What’s also familiar to me is sitting quietly and listening to all the conversations and not trying to get a word in edgewise. It’s like trying get in on an extremely complex routine of double dutch, palms out, marking the timing of the ropes trying to mark when to run into the mix.

Sometimes when I’m being quiet, I’d reach over and grab The New Yorker just to read the comics while the laughter rings on. On this occasion I didn’t even make it to the jokes. Toward the front of the magazine was a publicity photo for a performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night starring Anne Hathaway, Audra McDonald and Raul Esparza. It’s stunning. Literally, a two and a half inch square that made me tune out the sounds of the bar entirely. I took the magazine home and contacted the New Yorker and then the production staff to figure out how to get a copy of this photo. They said they couldn’t…or wouldn’t, or whatever. All I knew was I was empty handed.

That’s when it came to me. “Tatiana could do this.” She’s brilliant at capturing facial expressions and this photo had lots of that. There’s the central figure, female but dressed in male clothing, shocked at someone planting a passionate kiss on her. The woman on the left, the kisser, barely has her face toward the camera but the vein in her neck is exposed and pulsing. Follow that vein down the arm to her hand which holds a glistening sword. Follow the sword straight to the heart of the anguished man grieving on the shoulder of the original figure. This is dance for the eyes, circling and curving and bouncing from character to character, reading the lines, sending pulses of sublime passion, tortured heartache, and stunned guilt straight to one’s chest.

It was a tall order. There was such simplicity and complexity in the same photo. She took on the challenge and delivered. Now, the work is a thirty-six inch square and has even more depth and layering that the original couldn’t have. It inspires me to create dances with movement and passion that communicate such rich emotions without words.

If you would like to see other work by Tatiana DeFigueiredo or have her create something especially for you, check out her site http://www.designbytatiana.com