Press

PRESS QUOTES

"Graney now ranks as one of the top modern Choreographers in the country." - Christine Temin, The Boston Globe

"Pat Graney's work is camp, postmodern, satirical yet naive, fatalistic yet exhilarating. It's wildly original, totally derivative... It's cynical and loving, brilliant and rough-edged, graceful and klutzy. Its an odd kettle of fish, a dada delirium - and totally lovable." - David Gregson, The San Diego Union

About Tattoo:

"[Pat Graney] creates dances that portray women's lives as magical, furious, funny and complex." - Ms. Magazine

"[Pat Graney] is a choreographer with a mercurial temperament, which makes her unpredictable and provoative...Graney takes your breath away, then makes you giggle." - R.M.Campbell, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"The much-anticipated premiere offers the newest evolutionary stage in Graney's oeuvre, and promised much of what her Pacific Northwest audience is used to seeing from her -- namely, her trademark humor, irony, and use of imaginative theatrical elements such as composer Ellen Fullman's "electronic skirts" with live sound manipulation. The skirts are wired for guitar-like sounds and are attached to patform combat boots worn by the dancers." - Gigi Berardi, Sforzando

"Tattoo shows the choreographer at her most maddening and her most brilliant." - Mary Murfin Bayley, Seattle Times.

What I saw included (among other things) dresses shaped like lamp shades; twitching hands and long flailing hair; a veil of falling sand; a dancer in black hot pants and towering white platform heels; and deliciously lean, almost mathematically precise group dances interspersed with frenzied or minimal solos and duets, mostly performed in high-heeled shoes -- all of it greatly enhanced by Amy Denio's atmospheric score." - Bret Fetzer, The Stranger

"She works almost like a collagist, piling picture on picture, then looking for movement within the tableaux. The kinetic impact of the works comes as much from the Dadalike juxtapositions of the reasonable and the irrational as from actual movement sequences." - Sandra Kurtz, Seattle Weekly

"...archaic, evocative gestures with a ceremonial grace." - Chris Kaufman, The Seattle Weekly

"[Pat Graney] uses a process that has as much to do with meditation and exploration of the dream and memory as it does with designing steps." - Mary Murfin Bayley, The Seattle Times


About Sleep (Making Peace with the Angels):

"The dancing by this Seattle-based company is terrific throughout: clean, athletic, gutsy. Graney's work ... is heavy with theatrics and stunning special effects... Evocative and replete with ritual, the evening-length Sleep follows the path of women's lives from childhood, visiting adolescence, marriage and death." Janine Gastineau, DANCE Magazine

"Graney's Sleep is a theatergoers dream .... an ingenious dance theater Bildungsroman in which the hero develops through exposure to sleep, not life...." - Jean Lenihan, The Seattle Times

"Sleep has theatrical magic... The rituals of life pass in surreal imagery and unexpected choreography. The dancers movements are often dreamlike, floating or gravity-defying, illogical and beautiful..." - Ann Holmes, The Houston Chronicle


About Sax House:

"Sax Appeal - Pat Graney proved dance can be intensely sexy without an explicit gesture or word in her witty, crisply sensuous Sax House ......" -Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times

"Sax House ... a crisply athletic suite of dances with a political edge. Graney takes cliches of hot-blowing jazzmen and speakeasy society and splinters them stylishly. A male-dominated club slides through her witty, transforming eye to emerge as a world in which talented women call the shots."
-Deborah Jowift,The VillageVoice

About Faith:

"Faith approaches brilliance, existing in a hazy place where the human and divine intersect, where the passion of both joy and suffering are equally beatified." - Susan Mehalick, Metroland (Jacobs Pillow
Dance Festival)

"Faith is the kind of work upon which reputations for genius are built." Carole Beers, The Seattle Times

"Faith is powerful ritual theater." - Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times