Tobi Tobias

[The] evocative dim lighting [of Buglisi’s Requiem], now glowing, now ashen, reveals five women draped in baroque swaths of gleaming fabric tinted bronze, gold, cream, and dried-blood burgundy. Their dance-nothing more than sculptural postures and gestures, simple runs and collapses-turns them into anguished victims, stricken corpses, souls rising to heaven, heroic monuments. Throughout, cloth seems as sensuous and vulnerable as flesh. Village Voice 03/12/03

[They] performed their assigned tasks carefully and competently, always with attention to grace. But . . . their dancing contains little breath, little evidence of imagination, almost no expression beyond what can be rehearsed. Village Voice 02/26/03

Bill Shannon (a/k/a “CrutchMaster”)[‘s] . . . moves, though limited, provide an engaging contrast between percussive pacing and lyrical gliding, and they’re spiced with sleight-of-hand feats and illusions of flying as his legs swing free. Village Voice 02/12/03

[The hour-long show] features four of American Ballet Theatre’s galaxy of fabulous male stars: Jose Manuel Carreño, Angel Corella, Vladimir Malakhov, and Ethan Stiefel. [It] has clearly been designed for popular consumption, urging the viewer to understand these phenomenal athlete-artists as regular guys. (Born to Be Wild) [This] extended duet . . . is rooted in the way- back-then ’20s, when pastel sentiments flourished in American culture. (Green and Wright) Village Voice 01/29/03

[Mark Morris’s] work accommodates these as yet unformed aspirants. It forgives the limitations of their skills, makes their awkwardness touching, and reveals their best qualities-seriousness of purpose, charm, vulnerability, desire, radiance. Village Voice 01/20/03

Both the bios of these dance makers and the solid craft of their pieces contradicted the series’ claim to be presenting artists we know best as dancers, trying their choreographic wings-but no matter. We must take pleasure as it comes to us. Village Voice 01/08/03

Portraying an auditioning opera singer [in her Solo for the History of Piece, Summer] Morgan evoked a doomed Jean Rhys heroine-all ravaged beauty and morbid sensitivity. Village Voice 12/25/02

Snow . . . harks back to the modest scale and subtle emotional range of early ballets by Tudor and Ashton, [but it] achieves nothing like the dramatic power of these models. (Caines) [Jacek] Luminski’s choreography is ostensibly rooted in his extensive research into Polish folk tradition and Hasidic ecstatic rituals, [but] . . . I didn’t see much connection to these resources . . . on stage. Village Voice 12/13/02

Each choreographer recognizes the delicate balance [E.T.A.] Hoffmann proposed between gemütlichkeit and the darker regions of the erotic, the phantasmal, and the demonic. Village Voice 12/11/02

Le Roy begins [his 50-minute solo, Self-Unfinished] by turning himself into a postmodern Coppélia doll, moving as if the sequential postures and steps that normally connect and flow in a living being had been reduced to small, discrete elements executed by a creaky inanimate mechanism. Village Voice 12/04/02