“‘First Heat’, the best of the group works, takes
its inspiration from jazz.
“The opening solo coolly stretches, swoops and arches. Section
II hots things up with the ensemble scatting and improvising like
jamming jazzmen or holy rollers taken by the spirit.” —Lynn Garafola, Dance Magazine (on a shared
performance)
Read what everyone is saying about Lydia Johnson Dance. Click on each link below to read the most recent press:
- Star-Ledger March 2007 The sign on the empty lot said: "Coming Soon: South Orange Performing Arts Center." Choreographer Lydia Johnson, who has lived in South Orange for 16 years, used to pass it on her way to the train station. Two or three times a week, the struggling dance maker...
- NY Times 2002 The dances presented by Lydia Johnson and her company on Saturday night at the Theater of the Riverside Church stood out for their simplicity and quiet depth of abstracted feeling...
- NY Times 2003 Ms. Johnson's choreographic voice is an individual one that often makes poetic art of movement that might otherwise be described as somewhat gawky, in dances with a distinctive simplicity and eloquent abstraction...
- NY Times 2004 - 1 Lydia Johnson is a true original whose choreography repays close attention. The new and recent dances she presented on Friday night at the Dicapo Opera Theater were fascinating in the way they isolated and reworked components of classical ballet technique...
- NY Times 2004 - 2 a tantalizingly distinctive modern-dance choreographer who does things like making dances from flowing phrases of awkward movement and slight discordancies...
- Backstage Magazine 2004 Though grounded in balletic lines, Johnson's movement vocabulary luxuriates in the stretching of body parts and the flow from one deliberately sculpted shape to the next. Her choreography is unhurried, sensual, full of feeling, and even in its perkier moments, retains a sense of peaceful pacing...
- The New Yorker 2003 In a dramatic ensemble piece set to Hindemith, duetting couples interlock with machine precision; the women move with balletic grace, and the men tenderly cradle their partners’ heads...
- Attitude Magazine 2004 Lydia Johnson says she founded her company in 1999, after "mothering her 3 children full-time." Her 2006 New York Season at the Ailey Citicorp Theater reflects her maternal experience...
- Press Quotes on Early Work
