Repertory
Gibney Dance was invited by Symphony Space to premiere concrete mécanique, an exploration of movement as a vehicle for communication and physical interaction. How similar and different are we? How do we fit in or stand out? How are we noticed or overlooked?
concrete mécanique features music by Ryan Lott/Son Lux performed live by Music: Rob Moose (violin), Nadia Sirota (viola), Mike Block (cello), Alex Sopp (flute), Hideaki Aomori (clarinet) and CJ Camerieri (trumpet). Costumes for the work were designed by Lex Liang, with lighting design by Kathy Kaufmann.
Gibney's work gives emotionality as a starting point with tantalizing texture. Her dancers, beautiful and very clean, have mastered the controlled, swooping feel of her movements... The dancers twirl as the music plays elongated and slightly grating chords, and because here Gibney goes against the music's overwhelming rhythm, the lights quickly fade on a gripping scene still fueled by a fiery disharmony.
- iDanz
- 30 minute-work for 5 dancers
- Live Music
- Premiered on March 5, 2010 at Peter Norton Symphony Space/Peter Jay Sharp Theater inaugurating Symphony Space's Short Form Weave Series
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View Partially Obstructed is a choreographic reflection on what we cannot see or know. It delves into the subjective nature of perception and our struggle to create a full view of ourselves, others and the world, despite having incomplete or distorted information.
Life is spent thinking, pondering questions large and small, attempting to find our way to some kind of understanding, knowing all the while that what we know is far less than what we don't know.
- Gina Gibney
Gibney has created a work that is simultaneously raw and refined, pushing her company's capabilities of strength and speed to the extreme. View Partially Obstructed features original music by Ryan Lott, lighting design by Kathy Kaufmann, scenic and costume design by Lex Liang, and live animation by superDraw/Joshue Ott.
The kaleidoscopic visuals, manipulated by Ott on the fly, match to an unusual degree the dramatic shifts in Ryan Lott's score and Gina Gibney's choreography now languid and lynxish, now explosive or spooling out in long spirals.
- Brian Seibert, The New Yorker
- Evening-length work (55 minutes) for 5 dancers
- Premiered October 13, 2009 at Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC
- Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York Community Trust, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and others.
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 A rigorous yet delicately mined physical discourse, The Distance Between Us attempts to expose through abstraction the elements that unite or separate us. A multi-paneled set creates background corridors through which the interiors of the dance are revealed as the dancers negotiate spatial boundaries, both real and imagined. Created with a bracing clarity of emotion, the work's fluid progression of images evokes the complexity of personal bonds as it shifts between moments of extreme tenderness and charged physical prowess.
Gina Gibney's distinctive choreographic voice has made her one of the most intellectually stimulating of New York dance artists. There is nothing particularly brainy about her dances. She does not play mind games. Instead, quietly, she deals in abstractions, making them do the work of expression for her.
- Jennifer Dunning, New York Times, 2007
"The Distance Between Us" is a subtle discourse on the emotional ebbs and flows between people, especially w-omen, in an hour of meticulous, flowing beauty.
- Quinn Batson, OffOffOff, 2007
Gina Gibney's "The Distance Between Us" is flat-out gorgeous... Distance, like Gibney's 2005 Unbounded, occurs in a place of beauty, inhabited by strong, beautiful women É In her company's Domestic Violence Project, Gibney has done pioneering work with traumatized women through dance. The uplifting qualities in The Distance Between Us surely mirror those that are stressed in that project: self-confidence, trust of others who are worthy, freedom, strength, and resilience.
- Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice, 2007
- Evening length work for six dancers
- Composer: Ryan Lott
- Scenic Design: Lex Liang
- Costumes: Naoko Nagata
- Original Lighting: Kathy Kaufmann
- Premiere: Ailey Citigroup Theater, November 28, 2007
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Called "quietly startling" by The New York Times, unbounded explores the tension between clinging to the familiar and reaching beyond to the unknowable. It examines the human will to connect to, struggle with and even cling to what we know while at the same time, pondering and seeking answers in the unknowable and infinite. Enhanced by Kathy Kaufmann's subtle lighting and a set of fine white tulle, Gibney creates a world that both resists and embraces the edge of limitation, echoed in Naoko Nagata's costumes, Ryan Lott's original score and Anja Hitzenberger's video.
Art that engages often creates its own world. That was the case with Gina Gibney's new unbounded … Ms. Gibney has described the piece as an exploration of the tension between clinging to the familiar and reaching beyond to the unknowable. Her delicate, beautifully worked-out pieces have always seemed to juggle this fundamental duality of everyday life.
- Jennifer Dunning, New York Times
Premiered October 2005, Danspace Project (NYC)
View an excerpt on YouTube
Made possible, in part, with funds from the Danspace Project 2005-2006 Commissioning Initiative with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The development of unbounded has been made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, Public Funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; the New York State Department of Parks; Altria Group, Inc.; Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation; Edith C. Blum Foundation; The Harkness Foundation for Dance; Helena Rubinstein Foundation; in-kind graphic design and printing from O&J Design; and in kind audio-visual support from Joseph Freeman Associates. The costumes for unbounded were commissioned by Jane Grenier and Frederika Rosinski. The creation of this work also was supported through Danspace Project's DraftWork Series, WORKS & PROCESS at the Guggenheim Museum, and New York University's Tisch Dance Residency Festival.
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Thrown is a dance about disruption and unpredictability. A reflection on how individuals, relationships and physical entities stabilize and destabilize, Thrown examines our yearning for constancy and predictability, our desire for a stability which in turn elude us all. If we are constantly "thrown," how do we find our equilibrium? Thrown features an original score by Andy Russ, costumes by Naoko Nagata, and lighting by Kathy Kaufmann.
Gina Gibney's dances are polished to a tantalizing sheen like semiprecious stones … Amid the cascading shapes and flowing lines to which her dancers seem well attuned, Gibney is the last choreographer one would expect to get caught up in disorder, instability and disorientation. But there she is, having just completed Thrown, a work that pushes her six elegant dancers to their limits and beyond.
-Lisa Traiger, Washington Post
Premiered February 2004, The Duke on 42nd Street Theater (NYC)
Evening length work for six dancers.
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 Time Remaining (2002)
Inspired by an image of ancient temple ruins overtaken by entangled vines, Gibney collaborated with composer Kitty Brazelton and Normal Group for Architecture to create Time Remaining, a meditation on and celebration of time. Time Remaining entwines ideas of past and present, urgency and calm to explore the power of time to both erode and renew. This evening-length work features Gibney's all-female company of dancers joined by Brazelton's all-male musical ensemble.
Which came first? The music? The dance? The costumes, sets or lighting? It's impossible to tell in Time Remaining, an evening-length work so intelligently conceived and smoothly woven that all theatrical elements coalesce in a seamless fabric of movement, sound, texture and color.
- Wilma Salisbury, Plain Dealer
The dancers journeyed courageously through many choreographic seasons and times, and hearing the sound of their breath as they moved was like hearing the breath of life itself.
- Jack Anderson, New York Times
Premiered October 2002, Danspace Project (NYC)
Evening length work for six dancers co-commissioned by DANCECleveland and Danspace Project's 2002-2003 Commissioning Initiative with support from the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation.
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Several Truths (2001)
Gina Gibney's Several Truths tells the silent stories of women who share a need to find identity, understanding and connection in a world where things may not turn out for the best. Several Truths was created through a reflective process in which dancers and collaborators responded to a series of questions: What are you afraid of? What is one thing that you alone know? What can't be taken away from you? What could make you desperate? If left to your own devices, what would you do? Set in a fragile, austere visual landscape this work examines the vulnerability of human identity in a world of imbalance and uncertainty.
"Moves seem to emanate from deep within the individuals as they delve inward in honest attempts to find and share their psyches. Performed by Gina Gibney Dance - a quintet of women with the kind of charisma that gently demands attention - Several Truths is a compelling and authentic kinesthetic investigation of feminine identities."
- Lisa Jo Sagolla, Backstage, 2001
Premiere: April 2001, The Duke on 42nd Street Theater (NYC)
Evening length work for 6 dancers.
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Objects No Longer Present (1999)
 Objects No Longer Present is a physically and emotionally charged homage to the disappearing past that grew out of Gibney's real-life experience of returning to her childhood home after a long absence to find it inhabited by strangers. This powerful experience caused the choreographer to reflect on a number of questions: What is the residue of an object or experience? How clearly can we see in our mind's eye what is longer there? What happens when things that are familiar are taken away? For Objects No Longer Present, Gibney developed a process utilizing objects as a basis for creating movement. Eventually, these objects were eliminated from the process, allowing the movement to revolve around a remembered essence.
Its denizens are all female, and the choreography loves them the way the movie camera loves certain beautiful women. Objects No Longer Present displays an exquisite range of dynamic variety within an ambience that's mostly gentle and low-keyed, managing a satisfying balance between fluidity and moments of stillness when the body's lines grab the eye.
-Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice, 1999
Premiered November 1999, Danspace Project (NYC)
Evening length work commissioned by Danspace Project's 1999-00 Commissioning Initiative with support from The Jerome Foundation.
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Coming from Quiet (1998)
 An intimate quartet for an anonymous world.
Four women make fleeting, urgent connections against a shifting backdrop of music and sound. They explore a maze of hidden interiors and extreme edges weaving an intricate web of partnering and explosive yet restrained movement encounters.
Gina Gibney has established herself as a poet of modern dance today, and so the beauty of her title for the newest piece…was not unexpected. What stood out even more about Coming from Quiet (An intimate quartet for an anonymous world) was the aptness of the title and the strength of the dance's formal beauties.
-Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times
Premiered April 1998, Danspace Project (NYC)
Evening length quartet commissioned by Danspace Project's 1997-98 Commissioning Initiative with support from the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation.
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