Critical Response

"Doug Hamby doesn't want his audiences to get too comfortable or complacent."

[Doug Hamby Dance helped] "prove that the fusion of dance and technology only needed time to mature."

"If you care at all about modern dance in our region, you should be familiar with the work of Doug Hamby. His choreography, and, more to the point, his artistic direction of Doug Hamby Dance are consistently innovative and searching. He brings a polished product to each performance, but he also loves the edge of danger in experiment...

"...the technique reveals such a bewildering wealth of activity and detail...there is a sense of kinship between what Hamby is doing and the general multi-media, rampantly interactive direction that seems to be our inevitable social future. Evoking this so realistically, his dancers seem empowered individuals, and we the audience seem so close to active participation."

"His choreography starts not with inspirational music or a poetic images but with an idea...the concept worked brilliantly...solid choreography..."

"Doug Hamby likes to find new ways to look at dance...lyrical and spirited"

"Choreographer Doug Hamby's extraordinary recent offering at Dance Place (July 26 and 27) is undoubtedly one of the prescient precursors of much that is to come in the art that we now call 'dance.' Solidly experimental, this program makes prolific use of technology, cyberspace, and the basics of post-modern performance art to help drag the multi/interactive media movement into the new millenium.

"Fog, danced with riviting intensity by Julie Peoples and Darla Stanley...is a stunning visual fugue, set to a shaku-hachi-like score by Bradley...Peoples and Stanley give such poised and visceral performances. The choreography is exceptionally sensual, and these two beautiful dancers seem to have made it entirely their own.

"Look out for Doug Hamby Dance in the future. They are making a valiant effort to step out into the vanguard of performance arts."

"For me, the most modest work was also the most satisfying. Stasis, a duet between Whitney V. Hunter, who is black, and Steven Kellert, who is white, may be an essay on race relations. If so, it was nicely ambiguous, filled with the mobility of shifting positions, and moving toward wary mutual support."

Hamby's Magic in the Mist

"Doug Hamby's Fog, a collaboration with Steve Bradley performed Saturday night at Dance Place, may well be a signature work, adored and criticized for finding a new way to look at dance. The sensuous, dank, tender duet is seen only on a screen propped in front of the performers as they dance behind it with two cameramen shooting their every move.

"The dancing is so intimate and silken that I desperately wanted to watch it firsthand...Julie Peoples and Darla Stanley performed knowingly, bravely, with a heated sultriness rarely seen in the ethos of modern dance. (For a moment I thought I was watching Tennessee Williams.) Bradley's score evoked the strange desperation of foghorns and boats at the harbor, while Hamby's movements--all body shivers, ambivalent embraces with arched backs and limp legs, and deep lunges--showed what it is to be human, soft underbelly up.

"His premieres on the program, Walk to Heaven and Square Breath, offer a growing body of evidence that Hamby is a bold, ambitious artist willing to take risks...Square Breath, another collaboration with Bradley, bit off a great deal in the area of sound-movement exploration. Its sensibility seemed both a throwback and a tribute to the heyday of Judson Church, that Manhattan temple of cutting-edge dance."

Photos: Tim Ford