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Maida Withers with Je Young Kim

Surveillance - Photo by Adam Peiperl
 

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 Guardians - Adam Peiperlinvolved 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. 
Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times

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