Reviews

HOME  DANCES  DATES  PEOPLE  PICTURES  REVIEWS  SUPPORT  CONTACT	photo: Andy Mogg   "[Stuart] has sharp eyes for looking through facades and punching holds into cardboard defenses. She also has a good grasp at working crisp gestures into amusing vignettes with characters that stop just short of stereotypes. The frumpy high school outcast sneered at by a bevy of glamour pusses. The dowager and the rocker caught in an elevator. The ugly duckling that metamorphoses into a still awkward Odile. Because Stuart has a flair for inventing telling movement, good sense timing and handles comedy with a light touch, the pieces are not quite as sophomoric as they might sound." - Rita Felciano, Dance View Times "Erin Mei-Ling Stuart is a young San Francisco choreographer worth keeping an eye on; whether her dances are wacky or eloquent, they're usually engaging and well structured." - Rachel Howard, San Francisco Chronicle "this energetic romp about life in the classroom (Grade 5, I’d say) for four "students" (Christine Bonansea, Courtney Moreno, Erin Okayama, Noel Plemmons) and one vulpine, hassled "teacher" (the very adept Ann Berman) should win many admirers after Stuart incorporates it into her own company’s repertoire. The structure isn’t complex, but the choreographer proves herself superior in characterizing through movement (that’s no minor accomplishment)." - Allan Ulrich, Voice of Dance "[EmSpace Dance] demonstrated the sublimely heady heights to which contemporary dance can raise one’s spirits. Songs for You was a dazzling ensemble work [...] Street scenes, domestic disputes and internal monologues received eloquent delineation, thanks to Stuart's aptitude for capturing a moment and letting it resonate. Songs for You burned with relevance and glimmered with the hope that these, and all dedicated artists, might find creative fruition." - Christopher Correa, danceviewtimes "Stuart's thoughtful and unexpected choreographic choices were refreshing and unique." - Rebecca Hirschman, criticaldance.com "Stuart is a gifted choreographer with an eye for theatricality [...]" - Rachel Howard, In Dance "Since coming on the scene as a dancer less than a decade ago, Erin Mei-Ling Stuart has stood out. When she moves she looks silken, molten and boneless, a mythical fish girl/woman, or a shapechanger who slips between the real world and the archetypical, the human and the animal. Part of Stuart's magic is that she projects a sexy emotional availability on stage that flows out of a viscous physicality." - Ann Murphy, Dance View West "Quirky, cute, and shot through with a refreshing sense of humor, the unusual pieces Stuart has crafted for her company, EmSpace Dance, are built around such widely disparate inspirations as high school bullies, political glad-handers, and desperate people trapped in an elevator." - Hiya Swanhuyser, SF Weekly photo: Andy Mogg   "Type/Set [by Erin Mei-Ling Stuart] and Tails [by Kegan Marling], however, suffused the performance space with irrepressible energy; both left you a bit breathless and eager to see the pieces again, for fear of missing something the first time around. Trisha Brown’s cumulative gestural style and her constant redefinition of space likely inspired Stuart’s essay for five dancers (Katie Aggen, Ann Berman, Maggie Kelley, Sean McMahon, Julie Sheetz). The crisp decisiveness of the trajectory commands attention on its own. The title alludes to Christopher Keyes’s score, which makes music from the sound of a typewriter and provides an unremitting pulse. The joy here is the absence of logical transition; the choreography makes much of its discontinuity and is paced so cannily that when the dancers line up in a unison, you breathe a sign of relief. Stuart blithely mingles vocabularies. Pedestrian moves jostle with bits of parody; surely the crowned arms refer to a ballet class long ago. The whole is more than the sum of the parts in Type/Set, but those parts are impressive in themselves." - Allan Ulrich, Voice of Dance "Its ability to fill the stage with constantly pulsating action with only five dancers was not the least of Type’s attractive traits." - Rita Felciano, Dance View West
	"Stuart works with a sly sense of humor; it’s not quite confrontational, but has a clear edge to it. She also seems to have an ongoing fascination with stopping flow, freezing her dancers momentarily as if they're caught by a strobe light. Or she poses them like fashion models on runways. It gives her dancers an out-front, very public quality." - Rita Felciano, Dance View West "Choreographer and EmSpace founder Erin Mei-Ling Stuart has a flair for the dramatic, but her works ring true, evoking realities we may not like to admit." - Lisa Hom, SF Weekly "Stuart's tongue -in-cheek approach to creating mini-soap operas displays a much-welcome sense of irony" "One can only hope that the new Between Floors #1 and #2 will have more progeny. The short sketches of people trapped with one another in an elevator were high comedy; they were clever, economical, and funny [...] Stuart's timing was first-rate." "The mix of everyday movement and dance vocabulary in Line Dry, the first of four premieres, created a nicely billowing sense of time and space, one in which gossiping women transformed themselves into pure dance forms – only to go back to hanging laundry. A sheet became a bind that first playfully linked and then entangled two women. Lorevic Rivera's wistful solo with a shirt expanded into an ensemble number in which shirts became objects of both gratification and isolation." - Rita Felciano, SF Bay Guardian "[And Everything Nice] effectively traverses a vast landscape of emotions" - Susan Knecht, Posthoc.com