Press Quotes

Trace was a beautifully acted and very interesting portrait of how the mind, and especially memory, works.

- - Joseph LeDoux , Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science, NYU. Author or The Synaptic Self and The Emotional Brain

Trace is an experience.  Your senses come alive and you become aware of your perceptions disappearing and reappearing in your mind and body. The very moment you set foot in the theater lobby your thoughts and feelings become a part of the narrative.  Groundbreaking in its subject and form, Trace both sparks and satisfies your curiosity for scientific knowledge while making you laugh at every step.  It is an invigorating and fascinating experience in which your role as spectator is challenged.

- Marcela Goglio, Film Programmer, Lincoln Center, NY Film Society

An excellent work, and I never say that lightly.  It was conceptually and practically rich,something that is very hard to find in performance work these days... Extraordinary performances... I was especially impressed with how they captured the actual feeling of being a scientific/medical researcher, in all its nuance.  I've spent a lot of time in that arena, and rarely see it captured well.

-Clarinda MacLow, writer for the Village Voice

TRACE, NYC

review

The whole tour was a fascinating experience of seeing behind the contemporary surface of my city to it's rich past...

One aspect of the performance section of Trace builds on the intriguing experience of the audio tour section by inviting the audience  (again, via instructions heard on a personal CD player) to look around the space and at one another, listen to the ambient sounds, and speculate about what the people around us are hearing and thinking and if their audio instructions are the same or in sync with the ones we have.  We wait for the performance to  "begin," but we are really beginning to dream it, not just sitting there.  And those of us who may have walked the audio tour that same day are probably still in its thrall.  We are making theater through our senses, and the performers will eventually slip into the somewhat real, somewhat imagined space each one of us has set out for them.

In this way, the performance section continues our experience of walking the tour which overlapped our embodied, physical participation in the physical city with mental pictures and emotions invoked by the spoken narrative on our CD players.  In this way, both sections experiment with time, memory, and identity - flipping from one time, memory, or identity to another, collaging or overlapping, bringing one to the foreground while another recedes. (Sometimes we may have felt distinctly NOT of our character's time.  At other times, we may have felt, with wonder, his or her rush of emotion.)

In the performance section, two scientists (Tsuyoshi Kondo and Claudia Heu) speak to us directly, attempting to give us a lecture - demonstration about neurobiology and memory formation and storage with the talented Jeremy Xido giving a particularly intense, vivid, grounded performance as their research subject - a bike messenger with a head injury.  This effort spins way out of control and crashes, perhaps making the larger point that we can only know so much about the body, mind, time, cosmos, and whatever this thing is we persist in calling reality

- Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Critic for the Village Voice and Dance Insider