The Village Voice
March 29, 2005
by Tobi Tobias

"Eloquent Choreographer gives the expression Tough Love new meaning"
ShannonHummel/Cora
Joyce SoHo
February 19-22

Fear, hostility, loneliness, frustration, despair, numb stoicism, and frenzied hysteria wrack the five women who people Shannon Hummel's new Elsewhere. These conditions leave them little opportunity to offer or accept love. But—and this is the crux of Hummel's theme—they never quit trying, the hand of one reaching out tentatively, time and again, to a sister body likely to rebuff it. Hummel, who credits her dancers with collaboration on the choreography, creates this affecting world by combining instinctive, everyday postures and actions (the body's natural "speech") with "learned" movement (the artistic inventions of classical ballet and the major moderns). The results are enormously sophisticated on several levels, from the nuanced gradations of feeling expressed—the choreography quivers with subtle emotions, like the writing of Virginia Woolf—to stage pictures that remain beautifully calibrated whether the figures are still or running amok. Do I hear anyone suggesting a Bessie nomination?