About the Work

Hearts on Fire is an approximately 45-minute contemporary dance-theatre work created by Eryc Taylor Dance and made in collaboration with ETD dancers as part of the company's 20th Anniversary Celebration. Set to the emotionally charged music of Beth Hart, the work brings together powerful physicality, emotionally driven choreography, spoken text, cinematic staging, and theatrical lighting to create an intimate portrait of love in all its complexity.

At its core, Hearts on Fire asks a simple but expansive question: What does love look like when we strip away the idea of a single love story?

Rather than following one couple from beginning to end, the work presents an ensemble of interconnected characters whose relationships are constantly shifting. A duet becomes a trio. A partner disappears and later returns. Someone who once provided comfort becomes a source of pain. A lover may become a memory, a fantasy, a projection, a mirror, an adversary, or a witness. The identities and dynamics remain fluid, allowing the storytelling to exist somewhere between the literal and the symbolic.

The women at the center of the work are not simply five independent characters with unrelated stories. They are different expressions of one shared heart. Each embodies an emotional state that we may encounter, revisit, or carry with us throughout our relationships: longing, self-protection, desire, hope, and reckoning. The male figures serve as catalysts within this landscape. Their presence—and absence—continually reshapes the women around them while they represent different people, different moments in a relationship, and even different versions of the same emotional force. This work invites viewers to recognize pieces of themselves within each character and each emotional chapter. The stories become less about who these people are and more about what they feel.

Beth Hart's music provides an emotional architecture for the work, amplifying its themes of passion, pain, vulnerability, and survival. Within an immersive performance environment, choreography and theatrical storytelling collide to create moments that feel cinematic yet immediate—sometimes explosive and physical, sometimes quiet and deeply intimate.

Through emotionally driven choreography, powerful physicality, spoken text, cinematic staging, and theatrical lighting, the performance blurs the boundary between dance and theatre. Designed for an intimate environment, Hearts on Fire places audiences close to the action, transforming the performance space into an emotional landscape where the intensity of human connection can be felt from only a few feet away. It becomes the landscape of the heart: a place where memories surface, relationships collide, desire takes hold, defenses break down, and people are forced to confront what remains after love changes. 

Hearts on Fire ultimately explores love not as a single destination, but as a cycle of connection, rupture, memory, and renewal. It explores how we open ourselves to another person, how we protect ourselves when that connection is threatened, and the courage it takes to stay open after we have been hurt. The result is a visceral and immersive dance-theatre experience about the universal desire to connect—and the resilience required to love again.

Conceived and directed by Eryc Taylor and created in collaboration with Kayla Laufer, Lilly Lorber, Caleb Patterson, Brielle Sydow, Morgan Ziegler, and Amanda Stone, 

This work is dedicated to Beth Hart.

Performed By

Kayla Laufer, Rehearsal Director

Amanda Stone

Brielle Sydow

Morgan Ziegler

Lilly Lorber

Caleb Patterson

Alec Marianek

Lyrics & Music

Beth Hart

“Without Words In The Way”

“Rub Me For Luck”

“Baddest Blues”

“Caught Out In The Rain”

“Everything Must Change”

Soundscore

Mats Van Rossum

Approximate Run Time 

45 Minutes