Reviews for Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company Performances
Review #1 of 2: Austin Dance Festival 2022
by David Glen Robinson
Published on July 19, 2022
Kathy Dunn Hamrick brings the festival back.
Austin Dance Festival 2022 Produced by Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company at The Long Center's Rollins Studio Theatre July 14 – 17, 2022 Part I The Austin Dance Festival 2022 has taken place at the Rollins Studio Theatre at the Long Center. The event was very much an expanded version over what came before, with performance showcases and film taking place over four days. The 2022 edition may have been the largest ever, with three …
Review: The Magnificent Conjuring of You and Me by Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on May 29, 2022
Kathy Dunn Hamrick has carved out a niche for herself of high-energy, high skill, athletic contemporary dance. her audiences appreciate every new and surprising turn the company takes within it.
Kathy Dunn Hamrick speaks the language of movement better than most. This was stated about her in regard to last December’s In Situ dance performance, also at Café Dance. In that performance, stemming from the title, the movement addressed place and places—all familiar places—transformed by the pandemic. They were recognized anew in a process of metamorphosis, dancers hatching literally from bubble-wrap cocoons and finding new life after the dark restrictions of our collective confinement. …
Review: In Situ by Kathy Dunn-Hamrick Dance Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on December 05, 2021
This show was immensely complex. All the elements of IN SITU addressed in some way Kathy Dunn-Hamrick's responses to the pandemic lockdown we have endured for almost two years now.
Kathy Dunn-Hamrick speaks the language of movement. That’s not a huge statement; all choreographers speak it. But with In Situ at Café Dance this past weekend the movement was vastly more communicative than the usual athletic and abstract contemporary dance--typically, make of it what you will, have a good time, go home. In this presentation one sensed a certain insistence on conveying exact meanings and feelings at this time of being freed (almost) from the …
Review 2 of 2: Austin Dance Festival 2021 - Dance on Film
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 06, 2021
All the devices, techniques, and magic of cinema could be woven into the imagery of dance in these filmed selections from across the world . Shakespeare never said, “All the world’s a location for film” -- but this year’s selectees might believe that bent aphorism.
The culmination of Austin Dance Festival 2021 was Dance on Film, the innovative program of the Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company to present selected global dance films to Austin audiences. Unlike the canceled 2020 Austin Dance Festival, the 2020 Dance on Film program was presented in November of last year, safely under outdoor covid protocols at Rocket Cinema in Moody Meadow. This year’s edition returned joyously to the same venue. The core concept of …
Review 1 of 2: Austin Dance Festival 2021 by Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company and friends
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 06, 2021
Austin Dance Festival Performances had overlapping time frames, so that a single reviewer found it impossible to give eyewitness testimony to all the pieces in the grand event. The culminating piece titled "Entr'acte" could have been more colloquially entitled “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.”
The Austin Dance Festival, 2021 edition, was a triumph of bootstrapping. The 2020 edition was canceled when Austin and the world lay in the destructive grip of the coronavirus pandemic. This year the Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company, producer of the festival, had to reset all the organizational devices necessary to produce a live show with multiple artists. The job was especially hard for not having produced any kind of public performance for a …
Review: The Undoing of Nonet by The Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on December 06, 2013
The Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company (KDHDC) is said by many to be the best modern dance company in Austin, and it also receives notable positive mentions statewide. Part of this reputation is built on the company’s athletically powerful performances and embrace of abstract communication, a hallmark of all modern dance inherited from Martha Graham. And while much of modern, or contemporary, dance in the 21st century has moved more toward narrative story dances or drifted …