Thursday, July 2, 2009

'profoundly affecting' - very humbling!

To our satisfaction we were reviewed favorably by the critical press, as well. Mary Ellen Hunt wrote, in time to sell-out our final performance:
“Ideas of attachment and separation are sharply drawn in Dance Ceres' "In/divisible," presented this weekend as part of the Queer Cultural Center's 2009 Queer Arts Festival at CounterPULSE, where the company is an artist-in-residence. But what impresses the most about this engrossing work is how a carefully plotted structure and meticulous direction can uncover the richness of movement.

Choreographer Brittany Brown Ceres has been honing "In/divisible" for a year and a half, and the result is a smart, well-focused and tightly paced assemblage. Brown and her dancers have devised a compelling landscape in which gestures from the hieratic to the ecstatic reflect a turbulent internal world. Even though successive episodes - set to recordings by Theo Bleckmann, Ben Monder, Ramiro Musotto and the Bad Plus - develop a kind of ritual solemnity through repetition, the piece as a whole maintains an organic pulse and appealing contrasts in rhythm.
Although the company members vary in size and type, dancers Cari Bellinghausen, Rebecca Gilbert, Claudia Hubiak, Erin Okayama and Sarah Sandoval contrive to project a common internal motivation that gives "In/divisible" a clear movement consonance without being a dry exercise. Indeed, the last image of jittering arms set off like jangled nerves as a single dancer wanders slowly among the others is finally profoundly affecting.” (-- Mary Ellen Hunt, San Francisco Chronicle; June 6, 2009)

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