New York Times
March 2, 2004 - Dance in Review
by Jennifer Dunning

"Evoking Emotion Through Gestures"

Shannon Hummel's new "Stay," presented by Dixon Place on Feb. 22 at the Joyce SoHo, is a dance for two people who need but cannot accept each other. The subject is a familiar one in dance. But Ms. Hummel burrows into that need with the acuity of a writer delicately probing every facet of characters' emotions and situation. A few words and simple phrases are murmured or spoken, among them "stop" and "I'm sorry." But the clearest and most evocative expression of these tumultuous feelings comes with gestures and moves and the space between the bodies.

Ms. Hummel is fortunate in her collaborators. Donna Costello and Vanessa Adato, both impressively committed dance actors, never lose or overdo their characters' shifts of complex emotions. Severn Clay's subtle lighting helps those shifts along, at one moment chalky white, at another golden and at still another as shadowy as memory. And Fernando Maneca's set suggests both a physical enclave and states of mind. The women brush or push against what look like two city high-rises, made of gray-white boxes of different sizes with slits where hands creep briefly and folding chairs are slipped for momentary storage.

But Ms. Hummel herself has once again achieved the potent form of dance narrative that seems uniquely hers. She lets her audience ponder whether these childlike women, one dreaming and the other grabbing fiercely at the moment, are sisters, mother and daughter or lovers. At times they seem to be all three and perhaps not even alive. Whoever they are, and the mystery is a part of the dance's pleasure, when they draw close and pull away you can feel the quiet tearing of a heart that might be your own.

It is a shock when Ms. Adato, lying asleep across two chairs, drops suddenly to the floor. It is an even bigger shock, though less precipitate, when Ms. Costello continues so carefully to trace the lines of a body that is no longer there. Ms. Hummel is quite a story-teller.