The Provenance of Beauty is a travelogue, performed on a bus touring the South Bronx. The audience boards the bus in East Harlem, puts on headphones and crosses Willis Ave. Bridge, and for 90 minutes eavesdrops on the voice—live and recorded—of this historic place. Claudia Rankine’s evocative text points out and reflects upon the sites that pass by outside the windows – views that to an outsider might go by unnoticed—a factory dressed up as townhouses, the theatre where La Lupe once held court, now a Pentecostal church—these are complicated places that ask what creates a neighborhood in a city in a country in the world. Provenance is a theatrical experience that both responds to and redoubles the landscape, mapping out a poetic cartography of a neighborhood—of any neighborhood— in an eternal state of evolution.