Current Project:
THISTHAT SHOW NO.1
dance and other works by
Caitlin Corbett
Brian Crabtree
Rick Fox
Ana Keilson
Kate Nies
Melody Ruffin Ward
curated and produced by
Daniel McCusker
Friday April 25 8:00
Saturday April 26 8:00
GREEN STREET STUDIOS
185 Green Street, Cambridge, MA 02139
617.864.3191
TICKETS
Tickets $20, $15 for seniors, students and BDA members Reservations are recommended: Green Street Studios: 617.864.3191 Cash and check only, no credit cards
"Daniel McCusker’s ravishingly pure dances might be best described as brief epics, since they tell you a whole lot in a little time."
— Theodore Bale, Boston Herald, 2006
“Top Ten Dances of 2003”
— Christine Temin, Boston Globe
“Daniel McCusker’s long-limbed geometrical dances fairly burst with heart.… That’s because their rigorous structure, their edgy dynamics, and their idiosyncratic gestures permit them to show rather than tell their stories, as the best novelists do. … [His] creations… are abstract, nearly pristine. Their emotional content, drawn from some of the grand themes -– loss, love, hope –- arise from how the dancers use McCusker’s shapes and traffic to communicate with one another.”
— Thea Singer, Boston Globe, 2003
“Without any publicity or ideology, he has built a multi-generational company, one where teenagers he trained in Maine perform side-by-side with seasoned professionals.”
— Debra Cash, Boston Globe, 1999
"McCusker has a sculptor’s sense of shape and delights in the myriad ways he can mold the human body. He also has a gift for compiling gestures that individually seem abstract but, strung together in the viewer’s mind say something about the way we humans connect."
— Christine Temin, Boston Globe, 1998
“[Daniel McCusker’s work] reaffirms simple pleasures and human connections – among dancers, the community of viewers and the natural world, presenting new and repertory works in various formats, emphasizing the ‘organic process’ of making and re-making dances in performance. He weaves personal, idiosyncratic movement motifs (a quick lower back rub, a lunging fall, an open mouth, a few tiny pats) into unpretentious dancing that highlights the uniqueness of each performer.”
— June Vail, Maine Times, 1991
“Do I remember correctly that earlier dances by Daniel McCusker were linear, harder-edged, or is that a confusion of memory with McCusker slicing through space as a dancer in Lucinda Childs’s company? McCusker’s dances have all the precision and form and refinement you could want, but now the edges are softer and the overall impression is of works that breathe.… Perhaps it is the move McCusker made to Maine in 1985 where he is director of Ram Island Dance, as good a modern company as you could wish for outside Manhattan…. A dance to music is a group piece for three men and three women that’s intensely lyrical and flowing, refined and chivalrous in its partnerings, sophisticated in its patternings, like ballet in its courtly days, like Taylor with a lot of air.”
— Amanda Smith, Village Voice, 1990
“Pentimento, however, shows another side of the choreographer, who collaborated on this piece with visual artist Katarina Weslien.… The piece comes amazingly close to accomplishing a representation of the complete complexity of one single moment -- with its natural and architectural setting, action and reaction, memory and illusion, desire and disappointment.”
— Donna Gold, Evening Express, 1989
“The formal clarity and visual balance of McCusker’s designs in space are alleviated by the long, relaxed rhythms, the rise and fall energies…. Almost singable phrases are interrupted by poses that don’t seem abrupt or frozen, don’t have the delicate brittleness of an extra-ordinary balance, but evoke an instantaneous nostalgia that sustains the previous few moments beyond themselves. Pose is perhaps the wrong word – what happens is more provisional. The dancers pause with a wide-open expectancy, like the unsuspicious but natural wariness of small birds.… I liked the cleanness, the gentleness, gentility, the lilt and bite.”
— Burt Supree, Village Voice, 1986
“Full Circle was an unexpected high point of the fifty-third summer festival at Jacob’s Pillow, a season that gave McCusker’s dual heritage – avant-garde dance and ballet – short shrift. In scant evidence, too, was the vision that informed his work: a belief in the power of ordered movement to convey truths of a humanistic , personal, and aesthetic order.”
— Lynn Garafola, Dancemagazine, 1985
“Daniel McCusker is one of the best modern dancers to be seen in New York today, a performer who cuts deftly into space, giving just the right emphasis to every phrase. Not all good dancers make good dances. But Mr. McCusker proved… that he is a choreographer of striking and original gifts…. His new Commonplaces…achieved the extraordinary effect of creating a time and place through minimalist, geometrically patterned dance.… In Commonplaces we are living other people’s lives.”
— Jennifer Dunning, New York Times, 1983