Press of Recent Works

Posted on Apr 24, 2015 In News from Jane

40TH ANNIVERSARY RETROSPECTIVE (2018)

“Few choreographers approach such hot subjects with Comfort’s imaginative juxtapositions, an unflinching gaze, and a pungent sense of humor.”

Deborah Jowitt, ARTS JOURNAL
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 “As relevant as ever, S/He recasts the genders and races of the protagonists and antagonists of Anita Hill’s testimony during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings. The brutal interrogation of Hill (Sean Donovan, who ends naked in a pile of pale limbs and crushed objectives) by Black women playing white male senators seems even more harrowing in the deluge of #MeToo stories.”

Erin Bomboy, THE DANCE ENTHUSIAST.COM
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YOU ARE HERE (2016)

“The atmosphere is heightened by Joe Levasseur’s splendid lighting, and Lianne Arnold’s ditto video designs. Brandon Wolcott’s sensitive music and sound design begins with hollow sonorities and metallic percussion…Darrin Wright dances alone—a marvel of sinuous twists and turns around himself as if he were seeking equilibrium in a cockeyed world.”                        

—Deborah Jowitt, ARTS JOURNAL
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“You Are Here centers itself around the way we look at people, particularly strangers. She highlights humanity on a collective scale, showing individuals living in close quarters in urban spaces, navigating shared terrain.”

Meredith Bove, THINKING DANCE
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ALTIPLANO (2014)

“Jane Comfort is a master teller of tales—not straight linear narratives, but dances that bristle with content—often social and/or political, often involving spoken text. She has always ingeniously layered and juxtaposed elements and viewpoints that might strike anyone else as incompatible and made them ignite one another.

“Comfort…(who has made) this fascinating piece (a collaboration with composer Brandon Wolcott, lighting designer Joe Levasseur, costume designer Liz Prince, and seven marvelous performers) has tried, I think, to do something very difficult. Altiplano hovers and teases at the edges of abstraction, “meaning” shifting among the obvious, the enigmatic, and the hidden. Sometimes that interplay is disorienting, but mostly it draws you into a world that is both unfamiliar yet close to home.”

—Deborah Jowitt, ARTS JOURNAL
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Altiplano” is still a formal composition, beautifully arranged. The casualness of moments when dancers drop like ripe fruit, slapping the floor, contrasts with sections when they move in counterpoint with their energy contained and their limbs neatly folded.”

“Comfort has arranged a spectacular finale, with the dancers standing in a line across the far end of the space and watching us (silently calling to us?) through a curtain of rain.”

                                                                                                                                                                                       —Robert Johnson, THE DANCE ENTHUSIAST.COM
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