Press

“In Angharad Davies’ The Body is an Archive, viewers are encouraged to consider the body as a repository of story and memory as they watch a looped, eight-monitor installation of New Haveners dancing one by one in their art studios, homes, open fields, and favorite haunts. “Each of us is an archive that stores physical data from our entire lives,” she said Tuesday, adding that there is also a live performance component. As part of her process, Davies interviewed over 40 New Haveners, asking them to dance only after they had spoken with her for close to an hour. Before they burst into movement, Davies asked them to choose a location that was significant to them, so they might channel physical and emotional memory as they danced. One woman returned to a field beside the house where she’d been pregnant with her first daughter. Another went back to the site of their first kiss. Davies titled these vignettes “movement portraits.” The portraits are intended “to give the opportunity to the audience to be confronted, to confront, and to bear witness to the body as an archive,” she said Tuesday.” — Lucy Gellman, Arts Paper

“We’d like to see a lot more of Angharad Davies’ work after her thoroughly engrossing “THROB.”

— Pamela Espeland, MinnPost

“Angharad Davies’s "THROB” was the biggest piece of the night…it had energy, humor, and visual spark.“

— Jay Gabler, VitaMN

"The pleasure of symmetry and order alternates with the pleasure of individual quirk; the performers’ happiness radiates throughout. (And can I just say how nice it is to see such a diverse cast for a piece that’s not “about” “diversity”?)”

— Lightsey Darst, MNArtists.org

“Dangerous dance in which women get damn angry, but keep finding themselves bounded by pretty.” — Lightsey Darst, MNArtists.org

“Throughout the piece, the dancers, often with eyes closed, mime the content of memory — reducing bodily action to spare movements of the hands, cutting across time and space but in short. The effect is like seeing the panoply of memory condensed into a .zip file, some abbreviated and nearly inaccessible ghost of the original occurrence.” — Mary Coyne, MNArtists.org

“Angharad Davies employs the Southern’s unique proscenium to gorgeous effect, creating a series of intriguing stage pictures…. The dancers accept their fate, falling into themselves and into the floor with a radical acceptance of life’s perpetual thrust.”

— Sheila Regan, Star Tribune

**Arturo Soria and Irene Sofia Lucio in EL HURACAN. Photo © T. Charles Erickson, 2018.

"The design team assembled for this show is, to a person, exemplary. The opening moments are executed in snappy fashion through Angharad Davies’ choreography.”

— Fred Sokol, Talkin’ Broadway

“The opening scene of El Huracán, now in its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre, is literally magical. The swankiness of the act—set in the celebrated Tropicana nightclub in pre-Castro Cuba—is abetted by the dance the couple perform to Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me.” It’s suave and nostalgic and at a remove from the realities of the play, and for a little while we get to bask in a rare kind of show-biz transcendence.”

— Donald Brown, New Haven Review

“Angharad Davies supplies some smooth and divinely fashioned steps for the opening scene.”

— Zander Opper, Theater Review

“The Shadow Itself is a Place is Angharad Davies and Alison Moncrief Bromage’s closely danced spoken word collaboration. Their movement is fluid and gestural, and it mostly melts into and blends with the words being spoken…both movement and words drifting together until there are few sharp edges. Each without the other would require our focus, but the movement and words together let us audience absorb more than focus. The title is interesting here, as the dancing feels like the shadow of the words.”

— Quinn Batson, OffOffOff

“Angharad Davies and Alex Grant break into weird little pose – or mime – dances between snatches of awkward conversation, coffee breaks, and security guard duty. Now I know why The Office has never clicked for me: it needed to be made into a dance. The Office leaves me cold, but Davies’s slo-mo, sped-up, superlatively insecure deconstruction of work life cracks me up… I did have a few moments of trust, of reverie. I trusted Angharad Davies; during Security, I didn’t stop to think to myself, I didn’t sink from experience into appreciation.”

— Lightsey Darst, MNArtists.org

“After the show, friends and I asked each other, “Who are these people, and where have they been all our lives?” These people would be the dancers Angharad Davies and Alex Grant, who performed “Security,” the most cogent work of the evening, choreographed by Davies.”

—Gary Peterson, Minnesota Mist

“Work Party is so funny, and executed with such conviction and split-second timing by the cast (Jaime Carrera, Davies, Grant, and Taryn Griggs), that I would have gone for the rewind button if I could have.”

— Lightsey Darst, MNArtists.org

“Angharad Davies’s full contact choreography simply beguiles.”

— John Townsend, Lavender

“Director Will Davis and choreographer Angharad Davies have worked together to create a language of movement that blends football and dance so that the violence and chaos of the sport can be contained on a stage but not confined by it.”

— Matthew A. Everett, TC Daily Planet

“I’m most intrigued by the work in the middle section. This is the real meat of the piece, and where it has the most important things to say to the field. That movement exploration, with its lightning agility to switch between states and images, exemplifies the kind of physical skills we need to develop in the contemporary world. Outside a performance context, the volume of information we process and the speed at which we process it has risen drastically. Audiences are not slowing down; we are used to channel surfing and multitasking. Performance can also slow down time, and I hope that performance can suggest other modes of paying attention as well—but contemporary performance should respond to the pace of the culture. This work was one of the closest manifestations of that tendency that I’ve seen, relying not on a performative conceit so much as actual dance skills. ”

— Emily Gastineau, Criticism Exchange

“Angharad Davies’ solo took us away from…minimalistic nature…into the complexities of memory. Wearing a billowing robe, she gesticulated and spoke her way through Gone and Gone and Gone, inspired by her grandfather’s immigration from Syria to the United States.”

— Deirdre Towers, The Dance Enthusiast