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Dance Magazine In The Studio Feature May 2018

"Sidra Bell is one of those choreographers whose movement dancers are drawn to. Exploring the juxtaposition of fierce athleticism and pure honesty in something as simple as stillness, her work brings her dancers to the depths of their abilities and the audience to the edge of their seats."

-Dance Magazine In The Studio Feature by Kelsey Grills

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Interview Magazine (founded 1969 by Andy Warhol)

Featuring Sidra Bell Dance New York March 2017 Fashion Issue

By KATIE BURNETT

Photography BILLY KIDD

"Modern Moves"

The humble material of an American classic, denim is layered and deconstructed to give it dancing-in-the-street attitude

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Dance Magazine features Sidra Bell Dance New York Company Artist Leal Zielińska as 25 to Watch Breakout Stars of 2018 and on the cover of the January 2018 Issue.

"There's something about Leal Zielińska that defies easy explanation. In stillness, she captivates, flirting with androgyny yet remaining unapologetically feminine, her gaze at once frank and mysterious. In motion, her fierce athleticism seems at odds with her almost-ungainly facility, contorting into positions that beggar believability and then staying there too long for comfort.

She doesn't shy away from awkwardness but instead leans into it. Somehow these paradoxes resolve into a magnetic performance quality that makes the Polish-born dancer impossible to look away from, as well as a perfect conduit for Sidra Bell's bizarre, audacious, sometimes voyeuristic work."

-Dance Magazine 25 to Wach 2018 by Courtney Escoyne

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Leal Zielińska was impossible to get out of our heads after we saw her in a Sidra Bell Dance New York show." - Dance Magazine Courtney Escoyne

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T Magazine New York Times Style Magazine

Featuring Sidra Bell Dance New York Company Artist Sebastian Abarbanell August 2018

Fall’s Best Open-Toed Heels, Modeled by Men

This season, strappy shoes find a partner in slouchy socks or textured tights.

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"Abarbanell, for one, counts on his trust of Bell as a director—and her mutual trust of him as a dancer—to know that a decision to perform nude is right. 'That's vital when you're working in this space,' he says."- Rachel Rizzuto of Dance Magazine

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“Bell's worlds are singular--even when colliding with the worlds of Pina Bausch, fashion and Harlem's ballrooms, as they do here. They fold and contort as much as Sebastian Abarbanell's uncanny body. They are as ridiculously opulent as an extravagant hotel. It's hard not to cheer Bell on when you see all these things laid out just right and danced to perfection by this crew... you don't get dancers more weirdly excellent--and let me underscore, here, both *weird* and *excellent*--than Bell's troupe. Like super-clever sci fi writers and filmmakers, Sidra Bell Dance New York creates new worlds, exactingly-designed ones and hellish, to which we are invited. We don't have to go, and maybe we don't always. That's not to say that the audacity and stylishness of Bell's entire interdisciplinary aesthetic isn't brilliant and impressive and even hypnotically seductive. It is." - Eva Yaa Asantewaa of InfiniteBody

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"Sidra Bell Dance New York Dance exists to push the envelop. To begin with, the company is diversity itself. The experimental nature of these pieces can mask the technical excellence of every performer. Bell has deliberately choreographed bits that are ugly, inelegant, clumsy – call it what you will, these moments are the counterpoint to the expected grace and perfection sought in mainstream dance. So let me say again, these dancers’ technique is second to none. They have the capacity to catch lightning in a bottle, and if they do that in some future piece, I will not be surprised in the least."- Stage Biz by Jeff Myhre

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"This New York-based company uses provocative visuals and full-throttled movement to convey internal and social tensions." - The New York Times

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“Sidra Bell introduces us to uncanny alternative realities, often asking more questions than giving answers. Her fearless performers and collaborators, fully committed to the complex movement and theatrics, stunningly transport us to her worlds.” -Dance Enthusiast by Nadia Khayrallah

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“fascinating, captivating, genre-busting, existential fantasy world…” - Best of New Orleans

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“innovative”- TimeOut New York

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"inventively quirky and sensuously muscular" - The Boston Globe

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“garment about which I am unreservedly enthusiastic has already won praise, and rightly so...the team really worked the hell out of this one, in both sight and sound. There's Bell, the auteur who bills herself as "Director," not choreographer. And there's Amith Chandrashaker an adept of space and atmosphere, and costume designer Caitlin Taylor. Costuming, as might be guessed, looms large in Bell's universe but so much more here where it suggests a kind of kinky-glamorous masking of the self; an angry, frustrating search for a less-fraught, more ordinary self; and--with Sebastian Abarbanell's expansive, ritualistic solo--finally a taste of freedom.” - Eva Yaa Asantewaa of InfiniteBody

 

"Bell jumps from distinctly adorned, raw physicality to extravagant, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink theatrics to share her surreal take on human nature and identity. I was captivated by Bell’s intricate and unsettling onstage worlds." - Dance Enthusiast by Nadia Khayrallah

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2010 Best in Dance (for ReVUE)

“It was a ReVUE unlike any other, a blend of vaudeville, Fellini, and Cirque du Soleil. Ms. Bell proved that she had her finger on the future of dance where ballet and hip-hop coexist on the same plane.” - Pittsburgh Post Gazette

 

#1 in Contemporary Dance in 2014 (for garment)

"The New York choreographer wowed the audience in a thought-provoking piece focused on identity. Her company members were some of the most unique and talented artists I had ever seen, and her choreography exploded with creativity." - Pittsburgh Examiner

 

Notable Performances of 2012- The Year in Review (for Nudity)

"Perhaps the most profound gift that Tanz Farm has offered to the Atlanta community, so far, has been to present Sidra Bell Dance New York. Bell’s dancers brought a concentration of immediacy and edge to her new work, Nudity. The quintet created a personal yet formally conceived world where imperfections help define human beauty" - ArtsATL

 

"Bell has a lot working in her favor: powerful, daredevil dancers and an almost garish imagination capable of dreaming up surreal scenarios... a slick, in-your-face intensity dominates her onstage worlds."- New York Times

 

"Bell & her company are at the forefront of innovative contemporary dance."- The Vancouver Sun

"Bell's company is regularly in demand throughout the world, and critics are more and more frequently identifying her as one of the most intriguing and significant choreographic voices of her generation." - Creative Loafing Atlanta

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"The ensemble dances in a relatively shallow space across the gallery and gets up close to front-row folks in ways that heighten the persistent air of tension, risk and thrill. There are the crisp rhythms of street dance, the stark, deep-queer glamour of a fashion catwalk, the enigmatic drama that just does not quit. Bell calls upon a seemingly limitless supply of intricate movement ideas and shows no hesitation to share this largesse. And, from start to finish, her disciplined crew is ON IT. Video closeups amplify the unfiltered anxiety with performers staring into the camera and repeatedly tugging or clawing at their own bare flesh for reasons that remain mysterious. As for STELLA, she simply blasts herself into The Met Breuer and makes her formidable presence felt." - InfiniteBody by writer Eva Yaa Asantewaa 

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"I had an unexpectedly visceral reaction when the six dancers began taking their bows at the conclusion of the performance. I found myself so entrenched in the world Bell created that it took a couple of minutes to pull myself back out of it. ⁠ There was not a single moment, costume, prop or lighting element that went to waste. Whether it was a subtle elevated walk on the balls of the feet, a projected live-video feed, or contacts in the performers eyes, everything had a purpose and fed into the larger atmosphere of the work. This atmosphere was charged with a heightened urgency and drama that felt equal to the crisis of identity so many of us and our communities are facing today.  The multiple ways in which Bell and the dancers wrestled with and perceived the idea of identity were rich and vast. A moving and noise-making apparatus attached to dancer Misa Kinno Lucyshyn spoke to a complex and voyeuristic relationship with our identities and technology. The poignant repetition of the sung words 'my beloved' and different parts of the body while dancers intertwined projected a sense of identity woven with intimacy and community, while the jarring violence in other sections of the choreography referenced a powerful sense of self-doubt and indignation. ⁠The way in which Bell presented this perplexing material revealed itself as a metaphor for how we approach and deconstruct identity. I left the theatre feeling like I had more compassion for the diversity of our fellow human beings, grappling with the idea that this beautiful diversity is what makes our identities so hard to pin down." - Morgan Beckwith of DIYDancer Magazine

 

"brainy, exuberant audacity"- San Francisco Chronicle

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"Sidra Bell Dance New York has performed Bell's introspective, precise choreography worldwide."  - Dance Spirit Magazine

 

"rising star"- Pittsburgh City Paper

 

"incomparable"- Vancouver's CTV

 

"Bell is a complete creature of the theater... the ferocious physicality of her dance making is its most attractive quality"- San Francisco Guardian

 

"Bell's dance-theater works are intensely physical, concentrated and mysterious- yet they reveal the inner aspects of the performers with startling clarity"- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

"at once creepy and comical"- Washington Post

 

"fearless, technically honed dancers"- Vancouver's Georgia Straight

 

"Bell has an approach to the body; a deconstructor, hyperarticulator that makes her dancers look inhuman like broken marionettes or robots on the fritz...the grotesquerie suggests decadence, disease, a horror show..."- The New Yorker

 

"Bell represents total experimentation. She’s near controversial. She has a very strange gestural world and is not apologetic about it."- Choreographer/Curator Lauri Stallings in ArtsATL

 

"The worlds enacted by Sidra Bell across her expansive repertory are sumptuous facades. For Bell, every show seems to be a disappearing act behind myriad screens- garish costumes, jet- speed movements, blank stares and emptier smiles. Her performers are always self-consciously performing and her shows never forget their over-determined status as objects of fascination and opportunities for exhibitionism. The choreographer often borrows the tropes of performance to flesh out the contours of her world, seeing the stage as if through cinematic studies of it. This is an important, if subtle, point about Bell's work -- it arrives as so many copies of itself. It draws the spectator in through its use of customary conventions, but resists delivering on these terms. Behind the curtain, there is no wizard, only more curtains to be drawn back as the spectator crawls deeper into the world this artist has shaped." - Written by Danielle Goldman, Ryan Kelly, and Sarah Maxfield (Dance Theater Workshop 2010-2011 Writers) 

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"bizarre, audacious, voyeuristic" - Dance Magazine

 

"Watching Bell's work is like entering a mysterious couture circus. Her strikingly costumed dancers isolate body parts like puppets within her highly designed movement." - Dance Teacher Magazine 

 

"More than a choreographer, a creator of scenic worlds, Bell shares her way of work in Bulgaria for a second time. It stands out with a memorable and original movement language, which speaks about concrete principals, truths, and intuitions from a world of knowledge. She unites the presence and the behavior of the dancers, the text, the sound design and the choreography in a dazzling stream of forces. The dancers looked like creatures from a world of dreams, out of our physical dimension."

-Bulgarian Theater Critic- Elena Angelova

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"The dance, the music follows the logic of a fever dream, conjuring surreal, alienating sensations. Nudity is undeniably fascinating to watch... you have to admire the utter fearlessness of its dancers"

-Vancouver Georgia Straight

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"If quirky, kinky movement is your thing, this is the place to be." - The Village Voice

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"a choreographer with a clubby streak"- The New Yorker

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"finely wrought, vaguely obscene, zombie softness..."  - Financial Times

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"They dominate the stage with high extensions, giant lunges, and increasingly complex gestures that carve the space around them.  Progressing from impersonal encounters to moments of soft, tender contact... Absurd, kitschy, and hyper-referential, garment plays with text, audio, theatrical histrionics, and bold costume choices. The soundtrack with its mix of music, voiceovers, and repeating sound bites nods to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Pina Bausch, and drag ballroom culture. Dancers party, lip-sync, create a twisted contemporary catwalk, and execute gestural phrases with business-like precision." - Dance Enthusiast by Nadia Khayrallah