© Photo by Arion Doerr
As the dust has settled on COIL 2016, we wanted to share with you the great responses the COIL artists and their work received from various media sources. There were too many shows to include each outlet for each artist so we just included our favorites.
Ranters Theatre – SONG
“While the piece sounds slightly New Age-y, there is something transcendental and beautiful about its simplicity; because we don’t know what to expect, each of us are allowed to turn it into whatever we desire (a feature of truly great art).” – Jose Solis, Stage Buddy
niv Acosta – DISCOTROPIC
“There’s always something passed along, voice to voice, body to body. Something Black survives any alteration of form and any displacement of form, from Africa to the Americas, from the Americas to worlds beyond. Black always was and always will be.” – Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Infinite Body Blog
Samita Sinha – bewilderment and other queer lions
“If ecstasy and religiosity threw a party in a singer’s throat that might be the closest conceptual parallel to explain the fervent and unexpected sound of Samita Sinha’s
singing and her unusual musical work.” – Nicole Serratore, Exeunt Magazine
Frank Boyd – The Holler Sessions
“But when Ray sits back and lets the music wash over him, there’s dignity in his awe-struck stillness. His raptness makes us want to hear through his ears. And when the theater fades to black, as it does intermittently throughout the show, and we sit in the darkness with the music, sound becomes tactile, and even pop-station babies and longhairs are likely to feel like true believers in the gospel of Ray.” – Ben Brantley, Critics’ Pick for The New York Times
Kaneza Schaal – GO FORTH
“This production, part of PS122’s Coil festival, was inspired by Ms. Schaal’s visit to Burundi for her father’s burial in 2010, an experience that led her to reassess the role of ritual in grieving. The resulting seven-scene, four-performer work she has created throbs with the anguished effort of letting go — both for those who die and those who stay behind.” – Ben Brantley, The New York Times
Jillian Peña – Panopticon
“Jillian Peña had good reason to test our patience: chronic suffering was one of her themes. The duet she crafted with stalwart dancers Andrew Champlin and Alexandra Albrecht imagined philosopher-historian Michel Foucault’s all-seeing panopticon in the form of a dance-studio mirror. Each dancer in Peña’s Panopticon (co-presented by Coil and Realness) is the other’s image in an infinite, enervating regress. The doppelgänger-pane does not reflect; he monitors and judges.” – Apollinaire Scherr, Financial Times
David Neumann – I Understand Everything Better Now
“Both in the text, written in collaboration with the fine playwright Sibyl Kempson, and through a richly collaged sampler of movement styles that runs from modern American dance to classical Japanese theater, Neumann twins his winningly off-kilter humor with heavier forces.” – Claudia La Rocco, ArtForum
Findlay//Sandsmark + Pettersen – o’ death
“This sort of wizardry isn’t surprising for the company, the joint product of lauded Norwegian choreographer and performer Marit Sandsmark and American performance-maker and designer Iver Findlay. But if at first blush it seems charming or whimsical, Pål Asle Pettersen’s ominous score quickly dispels any notion that this is a magical fantasia. Rather, from the moment Sandsmark begins her tortured, aggressive, and ultimately despairing movement score, o’ death begins to feel like a miserere, a plea to god for mercy in a merciless world.” – Jeremy M. Barker, CultureBot
Helen Herbertson & Ben Cobham – Morphia Series
“You know that odd sensation when a dream feels like a long journey, but probably lasted only a few minutes? In its best moments, ‘Morphia Series’…occurs in that surreal place…” – Gia Kourlas, The New York Times
Annie Dorsen – Yesterday Tomorrow
“But while the piece does indeed rely on a computer algorithm that alters its dynamics at each performance, a pleasing playfulness and an affecting symbolic layer are hard-wired into it, too.” – Charles Isherwood, The New York Times
Chris Thorpe & Rachel Chavkin – Confirmation
“With his distinctly Mancunian dialect and mischievous smile, Thorpe brings an affable, conversational feel to the piece as well as a willingness to go off-script (he is the author, after all). At the same time, there’s something menacing about his physicality: He lifts a chair with a sudden jerk and one reflexively recoils, bracing for attack. It’s an unsettling synthesis, causing us to mistrust our initial impressions of everything.” – Zachary Stewart, Theatermania
Jonathan Capdevielle – Adishatz/Adieu
“For performer/ventriloquist Jonathan Capdevielle, mouth, breath, and voice are the instruments on which he composes an aural self-portrait in his entrancing and eerie solo piece, ‘Adischatz/Adieu’. Simmering just below the surface are questions about what it means to realize oneself in the light and in the shadow of others—about which aspects of ourselves are created in imitation, and which are received as inheritance.” – Jennifer Kransinski, ArtForum
Michael Kliën – Excavation Site: Martha Graham U.S.A
“To Michael Kliën, choreography is more than a dance on a stage, but something akin to an archaeological dig. In “Excavation Site: Martha Graham U.S.A.,” that Austrian choreographer, with the dramaturge Steve Valk, organized a one-time event as part of the Coil festival in which 24 dancers — all but one associated with the Martha Graham Dance Company — investigated their shared bond with that luminary of modern dance.” – Gia Kourlas, The New York Times
Xi Ban & Pi Huang Club – Shanghai / New York: Future Histories 2
“Last night at the Asia Society, the bandleader and his eight-piece ensemble brought those commonalities into sharp focus, throughout a set that began by making terse Western horizontal music out of ancient Chinese themes and ended with dissociative, distantly menacing, air-conditioned psychedelia. In between songs – and a slowly crescendoing, stormy live film soundtrack – the guitarist carefully and colorfully articulated his mission as both an advocate for the music of his home country and its infinite possibilities.” – Delarue, New York Music Daily