Sidra Bell Dance New York

Bell has a lot working in her favor: powerful, daredevil dancers and an almost garish imagination capable of dreaming up surreal scenarios... a slick intensity dominates her onstage worlds." - New York Times

"The worlds enacted by Sidra Bell across her expansive repertory are sumptuous facades. For Bell, every show seems to be a disappearing act behind myriad screens- garish costumes, jet-speed m

ovements, blank stares and emptier smiles. Her performers are always self-consciously performing and her shows never forget their overdetermined status as objects of fascination and opportunities for exhibitionism. The choreographer often borrows the tropes of performance to flesh out the contours of her world, seeing the stage as if through cinematic studies of it. It draws the spectator in through its use of customary conventions, but resists delivering on these terms. Behind the curtain, there is no wizard, only more curtains to be drawn back as the spectator crawls deeper into the world this artist has shaped." -- Written by Danielle Goldman, Ryan Kelly, and Sarah Maxfield (Dance Theater Workshop 2010-2011 Writers)

"Bell has an approach to the body; a deconstructor, hyperarticulator that makes her dancers look inhuman like broken marionettes or robots on the fritz." The New Yorker

"One must experience Bell's work with an open mind. She is exploring uncharted territories. With the passing of so many of our dance luminaries, the past revolutionaries of dance, new presences will emerge, choreographers who will reshape the landscape of dance, imprint a new face upon the scope of what is movement. I believe Sidra Bell belongs in this group." -NYC Dance Stuff

"Ms. Bell proved that she had her finger on the future of dance where ballet and hip-hop coexist on the same plane"- 2010 Best in Dance, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

"Watching Bell's work is like entering a mysterious couture circus. Her strikingly costumed dancers isolate body parts like puppets within her highly designed movement."