What people are saying about the Dance Moving Forward Festival:

Reaching for the heights; Emotion, meaning, humor, beauty -- the best of dance is on display at the Moving Forward Festival.
Victoria Looseleaf, Los Angeles Times
May 30, 2005

Transformative. Transcendent. Life-affirming. These are some of the ways dance can – and does – affect us, when insightful, provocative choreography is combined with the beauty of trained bodies moving through space. And so it was for much of Saturday evening when the Dance Moving Forward festival unfolded at North Hollywood’s El Portal Theater.

Produced by dancer-choreographer Arianne MacBean (the Diane Keaton of dance - quirky, endearing and eminently watch-able), this year’s event, dubbed “Ways of Thinking About Ways of Moving,” featured six premieres by local dance-makers, with live on-stage dialogues from several revered terpsichorean figures, including Donald McKayle and Victoria Marks.

Kick-starting the evening was Arianne MacBean's "Inside Dance (and other dialogic structures)." A Marx Brothers-like romp set to Vivaldi, with text by the performers (Liz Hoefner, Pablo Santiago and MacBean), the work satirically deconstructed the making of a dance, aided by Santiago's onstage video work. Hoefner, asking, "What is this?" pirouetted, leaped and skittered as MacBean directed, her gamine face filling one of the two video monitors. Movement became the message, with Santiago abandoning the camera to join the dance doings.
Also making us of text, albeit with a far darker scenario: Hassan Christopher in his “Side Effect (excerpt from Digital Rome,” spoke of the decision to clone himself for money in his voice over narration, as he and six dancers powerfully portrayed a neo-robotic universe. Cool, crisp and creepily sad, where violent quivering and manic hopping ruled, the work was a perfect fit with Kronos Quartet’s edgy string serenadings.

Holly Johnston created an alternate universe as well in “Passage/Etched,” a work-in-progress featuring topless Johnston and seven other dancers. A Tongue member, Johnston continued that troupe’s hard-driving, hyperphysical tradition, creating a mesmerizing, Butoh-like final tableau in which four dancers stood atop the backs of another quartet of dancers who, slowly rotating, precariously balanced their precious cargo.

Spareness punctuated Stefan Fabry’s muscular duet with Jeff Grimaldo. Dressed in black, the pair began face-to-face, mirror images in a pool of light, before executing a series of jazzy unison lunges and lifts. Warily, they circled each other, with the mood becoming bleak and playful, as Korey Ireland’s taped music veered from tango-esque accordions to windy whooshes, the balance of power always shifting, literally and metaphorically.

Keep on Moving (excerpt)
Tiffany Farmakis, The Valley Star
May 19, 2004

Just About all of the seven choreographers in the fifth annual DMFF’s "The Architecture of Dance" presented strong work. Some of the highlights included Donna Sternberg's "Gossiping to Death," which provided and intriguing physical response to the loud, rhythmic music featured in her piece. Katie Lowry, Nicholas Katona, and Michael Bodel showed that there is beauty in doing ordinary things. Their piece, "Courtyard" depicted the simple act of hanging laundry. The dancers moved hypnotically with the sway of fabrics on the clothesline and the soft, angelic harp music. "Squiggles," choreographed by Carla Lubow gave a playful touch to the show… and it closed with its most moving piece, "Anchor" choreographed by Kiha Lee. It took three months to compile a show that lasted under two hours. In that span the choreographers were able to challenge, defy, innovate and prove that local dance can be interesting. Those unable to attend this year’s performance would be well served to do so next year. 

Strong Steps Forward
By Chris Pasles, LA Times
June 28, 2003

Just about every one of the seven choreographers in the fourth annual Dance Moving Forward Festival, produced by Arianne MacBean, presented strong work Thursday at the Electric Lodge in Venice. Geordie Wright's "Twice Removed" was an exhilarating response to the exultant Sinfonia from Bach's "Easter" Oratorio. Televised on one of two screens facing the audience (the other showed the audience observing the work), dancers Rachel Colon, Brandy Hodges, Milva Rinaldelli and Rebecca Trigg boned and bounded to the music. They finished the dance by running up from the downstairs studio they had been in to look at the screen and then turn quizzically to the audience.

Maria Gillespie proved to be the Twyla Tharp of tango in her consistently inventive and witty "The Shape of Interruption, Version I" with herself, and Lillian Bitkoff, Todd McQuade and Chris Stanley soloing and pairing off in various configurations yet inevitably interfering with one another's designs and plans. Erica Rebollar's "Hope Code" was a severe but arresting solo incorporating martial arts poses and suggesting a quest for both transcendence and self control, while Elizabeth Hoefner solo, "Andrea/Ariadne," merged Greek heroine Ariadne and Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children. Hoefner's intention was clarified only in her artistic statement available in the lobby, but the figure's psychotic isolation would have been clear to anyone. Holly Rothschild's "She Will Not Speak," danced by Rothschild and Bitkoff dealt with divided selfhood through mirrored and discordant images and movements. ... Maggie Lee's "The Fullness of Nothing," utilized intriguing costumes by Sandra Burns to transform the dancers into insects..., and Sarandon Cassidy's, "Box of Confections," dealt with women’s sexual commodification.

The Dance Moving Forward Festival has been proudly nominated for a Lester Horton Award in 2001 and 2002 for "Best Festival or Series."

DMFF is "an example of sistah's doing it for themselves – boundary pushing, definition busting local artists dedicated to fighting the good fight – to challenge, defy, innovate and in general prove that local dance can be interesting." - Sara Wolf, LA Weekly, Oct. 4, 2002

DMFF is an "ambitious, feminist innovation." –Lewis Segal, The Los Angeles Times, Aug. 25, 2002

The work of DMFF 2002 Choreographer, Banafsheh Sayaad was "a font of exquisite perpetual motion, a template frieze come to life, a one-woman whirling dervish, trance spinning to a glorious percussive track as she beckons us into her exotic world." – Victoria Looseleaf, The Los Angeles Times, Oct. 14, 2002

"Intriguing, mesmerizing, talented female dance-makers. " - Ann Haskins, LA Weekly, Oct. 4, 2002