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Maida Withers
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One reason Maida Withers just won a "Pola" (D.C.'s dance award named
after the late Pola Nirenska) for outstanding
contribution to dance is that Withers has a Weltanschauung. The German
term for "world view," seems apt because hers is not just a point of view
but a weighty world perspective. She believes that the mechanical and the
natural belong to each other and must be a part of art. Over the
years, Wither's dance works have involved
lasers and computers, deserts and skies, and dozens of other inventions
and environments. She celebrates them, uses, them, and sometimes
reuses them in new ways. This choreographer is committed to being
on the foreftont. George Jackson, Dance Magazine
Art and technology may seem polar opposites, but Thursday night at Lisner Auditorium they combined in extraordinary ways. While "interactive" "multimedia" and "online" have very nearly become cliches, Maida Withers and her Dance Construction Company found avenues to enliven the art-technology confluence with the 85-minute opus, Aurora/2001: Dance of the Auroras - Fire in the Sky. Lisa Traiger, The Washington Post Utah * Spirit Place * Spirit Planet * Tukuhnikivatz, a
work drawn from the ancient art of American Indians and the rugged wilderness
of Utah ...Withers' piece was ambitious and awesomely complex, filling
the stage of the Damrosch Park bandshell with layer upon layer of huge
video images and photographs projected on rocklike sculptures. Live
bodies moved among them, both dancers and ceremonial figures. ...Evoked
a midworld between dreams and everyday reality.
Maida Steel …Maida Withers depicts primitive terrain. ...The dancers are in constant action, pushing the boundaries of pure physical dance. Gia Kourias, Time Out, NYC The concert bore her unmistakable stamp, a kind of aesthetic aroma compounded of equal parts wit, iconoclasm, and inventive curiosity. What binds together Withers' choreography is not stories, romance, sex, or sociology, but the sheer exhilaration and imaginative fallout of movement ?? movement interpreted in the widest and most liberated sense. Alan M. Kriegsman, The Washington Post Picture the Washington dance scene without Maida Withers...how much duller, drier, and shorter on surprise the last decade would have been. Then, as today, she was our prime evangelist of the novel and strange byways of dance, a tireless advocate of causes, aesthetic and otherwise, and a human juggernaut in the force of her wit, stamina, and intelligence. Alan M. Kriegsman, The Washington Post In the rehearsal hall of Guangdong Modern Dance Company, I met 57-year-old Ms. Maida Withers from the United States ... with her golden hair, the graceful outline of her face, her big-boned frame and her forceful and brilliant dancing posture... God gave her a perfect figure to be a dancer. Xu Ling, Guangzhou Youth Daily, Guangdong, China Maida Withers' love of risk and the unknown has led her and us through dozens of daring choreographic expeditions over the past decade...less interested in charming spectators than in prodding them into unexpected modes of perception, she's always preferred to take a grand leap into the abyss than an easy swim across the pool. Stall. is challenging ?? no less to the audience than to the dancers; it’s also bold in conception, at once stark and vivid in atmosphere, and mammoth in dimension. …Though the thread of a distinctive personal vision runs through all of Withers' works, no two of them are ever quite alike. Alan M. Kriegsman, The Washington Post Laser Dance...combines technology and movement in complex
and wondrous ways...beautiful green beams creating a constantly changing
sculpture through which the dancers cavort, both on feet and on stilts...all
makes for one of the more ambitious and original arts events in this city's
recent past. Pamela Sommers, The Washington Post
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