APAP PERFORMANCE
CITY CENTER, STUDIO FOUR

January 9, 2010

ERICK HAWKINS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
92nd St Y's 75th ANNIVERSARY
NEW YORK, NY

January 9, 2010




THE CENTER FOR PERFORMING ARTS
RHINEBECK, NY

May 28th, 29th, and 30th  2010

FRIDAYS AT NOON
92nd ST Y, NEW YORK, NY

November 21, 2008

THE CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
RHINEBECK, NY

January 31st and February 1st 2009

I love the Center for Performing Arts as a theater space. It’s comfortable and I love being that close to the stage. That sense of intimacy worked well with the type of dance that Hawkins is—it’s meditative and dreamish. You almost start imagining that you can hear the whirring of brain activity as the dancers decide precisely where to put their feet. I was intrigued at how the music seemed to exist in one place, and the dance in another. I’ve never considered them separate entities, but I liked the mental hoop-jumping that aspect inspired.

The movement is very pure—very pared down. No pirouettes, no bells and whistles, no plot twists. It’s easy to believe that Hawkins was a pupil of Balanchine, and emerged as a clear modern (in the modernist manner of modernism) voice. The body is the focus, and how that body has learned to master itself. I’m not opposed to bells and whistles at all, but watching the Hawkins Company is like drinking very cold water instead of lukewarm diet soda.
                                           DANA GAVIN





ERICK HAWKINS' 100TH PROJECT
UNIVERSITY of NEVADA, LAS VEGAS

April 23rd, 24th, 25th 2009




JACOB'S PILLOW DANCE FESTIVAL
INSIDE / OUT SEASON

July 15, 2009

AMERICAN DANCE GUILD PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL
MANHATTAN MOVEMENT ARTS CENTER

September 10th and 11th 2009

An exquisite rendering of Erick Hawkins' 1963 masterwork, "Cantilever," was the star of the festival. And rightly so. Performed to live music (as are all Hawkins' pieces), this four person work is no less than an historical document of post-Eisenhower optimism and angst. "Mad Men" sleek, this dance is taut as a fitted sheath dress on a firm body. Lucia Dlugoszewski's blaring trumpets, rippling sheet metal and jangling wind chimes make fanfares of sound heralding Kristina Berger, Jacquelyne Boe, Jeff Lyon and Wendell Cooper as they scan the horizon with rigid attentiveness. It sounds old fashioned, but Hawkins mixes soft caresses and big, curvy swoops of the arms with angular T-shaped jumps and static poses that look as radical now as they must have almost five decades ago. Boe, in particular, is a marriage of feminine curves and detached sensuality that makes Hawkins' work sing with an internal joy.
                                                LISA RINEHART