Keen [No. 2] and set designers Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen nominated for a 2018 New York Dance and Performance (the Bessies) Award for Outstanding Visual Design.
-the Bessies
“Her Longtime Dancer Died. Instead of Moving On, She Embraced Loss”
– New York Times – feature
“it looked like a behavior — not an aesthetic
something biological;
a virus, a sigh
a behavior that many were a part of making visible”
– Culturebot – “Between Walled Rooms”, a freeform response to Keen [No.2]
“Keen [No. 2] engages head-on with grief, its rituals and physical manifestations. Alternating large group sequences with intimate solos and duets, the performance stages mourning on various scales, from the communal to the deeply personal.”
“Baldwin is grappling with something that, like that monumental accumulation of paper on the back wall, is enormous and inscrutable. In response she turns, turns, and the honesty and artistry with which she and her company do so is itself a gift.”
– Contemporary Performance
“Baldwin’s work, nuanced in various facets of human emotion, recuperates the stereotypical hysterical woman.”
“This juxtaposition of angelic grace and violent rage suggests that women can feel a multiplicity of emotions and exist in multiple states of being simultaneously, thwarting the notion that women should fit into one particular mold. To be female is to be and feel many things. And in feeling female, feeling beyond the boundaries of ordinary American culture, we can escape the stereotypical perceptions of what it means to be a woman and define femininity on our own terms.”
– Culturebot
“..most of us haven’t the resources, the depth of feeling, or the tenacity to create or witness a ceremony like this.”
– Village Voice
“Like the process of grief itself, Keen [No. 2] makes no appeal to what a viewer might want or accept. It is unreasonable and unruly in nature, but it is true to its own purpose and logic, presented with admirable conviction..”
– InfiniteBody
“Keen [No. 2] is intended as an homage to a friend and collaborator. But it is Baldwin’s response to a particular social and political moment, too. The piece features a group of women who vary in age and appearance; they are unapologetic about how they move their bodies or use their voices. When they scream, they project both rage and release. And unlike Baldwin at the MacDowell residency, these women do not move alone.”
– Brooklyn Rail
“Mostly slow and severe, with idiosyncratic touches and an excellent all-female cast, it dares both sculptural spareness and the overtly emotional expression of wailing.”
– The New Yorker
“Keen [No. 2], through its depiction of the finer gradations of grief, awakens deep-seated emotions that we tend to tuck away. Baldwin and these strong women remind us that we’re not alone.”
– Dance Enthusiast
Keen (Part 1)
“Baldwin has created a powerful mourning meditation”
– Dance View Times
“Even pared down, “Keen” is an emotionally charged work that, in just over an hour, transforms much of the Glass House property — from the area around the pond, to the house, to the vast front lawn — into a stage.”
– New Canaan News
Oxbow
“Baldwin is a collagist—a bit of absurdist humor here, a surge of violence there. She can be arch, but her new “Oxbow,” named for a bow-shaped lake formed by a meandering river, is suffused with sadness, and seems to continue a recent turn toward seriousness. Wade Cavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen’s set of twisted paper suggests the gnarled trees that come to menacing life in fairy tales, and Baldwin’s capricious imagination tries to find a way out.”
– The New Yorker
“Baldwin is only getting better..”
– The Village Voice
“Oxbow is a riveting dance performed by an extremely talented company”
– This Week In New York
“It is one of Baldwin’s gifts and also one of her liabilities that she can invite us to contemplate what might be a folk tale from a country we can’t remember visiting.”
– ArtsJournal
Ambient Cowboy
“I don’t know whether Baldwin roams around looking for images that will nourish her choreographic appetite, or whether she simply goes about her life and things suddenly catch her eye.”
– ArtsJournal
“If you want to catch a glimpse of where dance and performance are headed, look no further than Ivy Baldwin’s Ambient Cowboy”
– Gwarlingo
“There are a few lovely moments in Cowboy when Baldwin, with her keen eye, captures something ordinary in a way that’s so right it becomes extraordinary.”
– The Huffington Post
“When the dancers were disjointed, movements out of sync and sporadically placed about the space, I felt the same kind of disorder, discomfort, and misunderstanding as one may feel when a garbage dump is haphazardly set into a residential neighborhood, or a modern building design fights with its surrounding city or landscape.”
– Origins of Cool
“The sophisticated compositional divergences call attention to the less-controllable personal ones.”
– The New York Times
“Baldwin’s work contains very human aspects, such as endearing, sometimes awkward interactions, and a sense of lightheartedness. The feeling of randomness is quickly subverted when the dancers move together in formation, or suddenly resemble a Rodin sculpture. The piece is quietly moving without any overt narrative.”
– Ephemeralist
Here Rests Peggy
“Ivy Baldwin’s latest work, Here Rests Peggy, refines and condenses many of the fascinating things we’ve seen previously from the choreographer… performed pitch-perfectly… Anna Schuleit’s painting is the backdrop-a gorgeous gray-grounded abstraction, with hints of human limbs-lit beautifully by Chloe Z. Brown. Any feeling of formality from this relatively traditional mise en scène is quickly banished as the dancers slam the wall with their palms, and crash into it with the full force of their hurled bodies… Baldwin’s works are very theatrical, and yet they are built with beams, bricks, and furnishings of dance… I could’ve watched it over again right away.”
– PBS 13/Sunday Arts
“The Peggy in the title is the heiress Peggy Guggenheim, a collector of art and lovers. Her spirit can be felt in Walter Dundervill’s period costumes, in Anna Schuleit’s modernist backdrop, in the glamorous posturing of the four dancers, and in the way the agitation in their poses, pressurized through repetition, turns violent. Peggy is just a point of reference, though, and few of the work’s felicities can be so directly sourced: Eskimo kisses, dolphinspeak, a witty use of radiators.”
– The New Yorker
“fabulously enigmatic … A year or so ago, I compared Baldwin to a hunter-gatherer, foraging for provocative imagery to nourish her highly individual creative impulses… [Baldwin’s] bent is for deconstructing and combining elements to build bizarrely entrancing new realities that don’t necessarily make spectators any wiser about her sources.”
– The Village Voice
“A quartet of strong performers devoured the space in the small theater, whose far end was blocked by a plywood wall, painted gray with skeins and bursts of colors (by Anna Schuleit) to resemble something like the Abstract Expressionist paintings Guggenheim collected… These moments of theatrical violence floated through big muscular patterns that had the dancers sweeping across the floor, arms pumping and scything, pelvises gyrating, torsos hinging.”
– The New York Times
“Baldwin’s rich, sensitive, and thoughtful choreography and mise-en-scene will keep you more than interested and-probably better-eagerly grasping at tendrils of recognition that strafe off her lovely piece, leaving you in a rapt state of fascination and curiosity for the duration of the show.”
– Culturebot
“Baldwin loves to be mysterious, and she has gotten quite good at it… [Peggy] ranges wide and free in this performance, but it never strays… each scene feels right in itself and ends just in time for the next to begin… ”
– Offoffoff
“Saturated with unspecified drama and hyper-physicalized emotion… An abstract painting by Anna Schuleit-with dynamic splotches and sizzling lines-serves as the dancers’ backdrop as well as a barrier to thrash and thrash again… Justin Jones’ surreal score plays out with a jittery low fever-an internal, obsessive, often sensuous shuffling constructed of sounds natural, vocal, and cinematic… One appreciates the swinging, full-body reach and exuberance of Baldwin’s choreography and the all-in conviction of her dancers… [Peggy] contains some ‘haunted house’ surprises-heightened, sometimes alarming uses of force and imagery-best left to discovery by new audiences. She gets your full attention…
– Dance Magazine
Bear Crown
“Ivy Baldwin makes puzzling, theatrical pieces full of arresting images and allusive ideas.”
– The New York Times
“There’s something about Ivy Baldwin’s work that’s transporting. It could be the movement, which shifts between childlike play and virtuosity. It might be the attention to detail in every element, from lighting to set to sound, including a settling overture. It might be the five engaging performers, including Baldwin. In all likelihood, it’s everything assembled and polished til it gleams. Baldwin’s new work makes the cavernous theater look wonderful.”
– PBS 13/Sunday Arts
“‘Long live the bear!’ Long live choreographers who succeed in taking audiences on a dreamlike journey, out of the realm of the rational into the pleasurable absurd.”
– Mediatized
“Baldwin’s work is highly theatrical, brimming with loopy ideas and evoking idiosyncratic characters and situations through music and her own slightly weird, highly specific movement language.”
– The New Yorker
“Bear Crown is pitch-perfect throughout.”
– Gay City News
“Imagination’ is a frequently cited attribute when critics discuss Ivy Baldwin’s choreography. In recent years, she has created a series of compelling and evocative-if not always clearly decipherable-human landscapes…”
– New York Press
“Congratulations to Body and Soul interviewee Ivy Baldwin and her creative team upon the successful opening night of Bear Crown at Dance Theater Workshop. The piece dreams up an environment of open, luminous structure with pockets of wit, mystery and danger.”
– Body and Soul
“It’s hard to believe that Ivy Baldwin has been choreographing for ten years; she formed a small company the same year she collected her MFA from NYU-Tisch (yes, I knew her when). Since then, she’s become a bright feature of the ‘downtown’ scene in New York and shown her work at festivals abroad.”
– The Village Voice
Could be nice ….
“If you liked the movie Knocked Up, you just might love the work of choreographer Ivy Baldwin. She pairs shlubby guys with elegant, remote women to create very contemporary dance theater.”
– Dance Magazine
“On Saturday night it seemed that I alone did not get the joke.”
– The New York Times
“Ivy Baldwin is a choreographer with a taste for humor inherent in strangeness and oddity.”
– The New York Times
“Baldwin’s wide ranging imagination and affinity for the surreal lead her down a different path for each new work.”
– The New Yorker
“Laced with deadpan melodramatic edge, which Mindy Nelson uncannily conveys through her subtly raised chin and slightly supercilious eyes, the trio offers intriguing physical interactions.”
– Gay City News
“The dancer’s mouths are wet in Could be nice… They’ve been chewing orange slices, and we can almost feel the juice clinging to their palates, where it’s flavor mixes with the taste of sweat.”
– The Star Ledger
“Young Choreographer to Watch”
– BALLETTANZ MAGAZINE’S 2008 YEARBOOK
It’s Only Me
“A fusion of low and high, of elegant and comic, is Baldwin’s secret weapon and the source of her great charm … By turns beautiful and ridiculous, achingly familiar and bracingly strange, Baldwin’s piece kept us off balance.”
– Gay City News
“Best ‘Newcomer,’ though she’s been around a while Performer-choreographer Ivy Baldwin for It’s Only Me at Dance New Amsterdam.”
– Metro NY
“Baldwin creates hermetic, narrative evenings that don’t feel quite like anything else … Baldwin has a vivid imagination and clear, if very strange, fantasies that she brings to life.”
– Culture Vulture
“The young Ivy Baldwin is a choreographer with a knack for creating oddly coherent other worlds. Her peripatetic imagination turns her dancers into composite creatures, funny and poignant, whose gaits, gestures, and behaviors elicit fascination and empathy”
– The New Yorker
Gone Missing
“… both women’s dances are so smart and so well executed and so full of stimulating invitations for thought…”
– The New York Times
“Still, thinking back over 2006, I remember a few instances of transformation. One is Ivy Baldwin’s GONE MISSING at Dance Theater Workshop.
– Movement Research Online
“… a wonderfully haunting dance-theater piece… Baldwin shapes a few images and ideas with clear yet delicate strokes.”
– The Village Voice
Now Leaving Vanderville
“You could probably use some belly laughs and choreographer Ivy Baldwin’s got ’em.”
– The Village Voice
“A wild ride from beginning to end, it is feel-good dance theater with subtle, dark allusions.”
– OffOffOff