Press
Life As A Catwalk, Runway And Stage by Dorion Weickmann (Süddeutsche Zeitung, translation Phil Cooksey) Sept 24-25 2011
“Civic Mimic is a highly virtuoso game with the condition humaine in the era of urbanity and at the same time references the history of dance. Although Siegal, a specialist in cross-media performance with theoretical underpinnings, would never claim the throne of a choreographer god, his premiere cites a divine predecessor, none other than Vaclav Nijinsky. Siegal puts the performers – five women and one man – in tennis clothes, thereby awakening memories of “Jeux“ (1913), the piece with which Nijinsky first brought the gestalt of the white sport onto the dance stage. A dancer also poses as a faun and thus adds the animal counterpoint to the theme of the evening: How does urban civilization affect its citizens? How do we behave on the public catwalk, individually and collectively?”
Submerging In The Shoal by Sabine Leucht (Süddeutsche Zeitung, translation Phil Cooksey) Oct 15 2011
“The six are under stress, seem to be remote-controlled, driven: Five female dancers and male dancer in white (tennis?) clothes bustle around each other, fumble synchronously with their ears or t-shirts. And when they touch each other, the quality of the contact flips over at once – from impulse to disturbance, from cuddling to jostling and back again. The (dancers and other volunteer spectators) lay their heads on the catwalk, lie down on their backs cross-legged and look at each other intensely. And everyone is invited to join in, to mimic, to submerge in the shoal.”
What Was Most Enjoyable This Year by Sylvia Staude (Frankfurter Rundschau) Ballet-Tanz International Worldwide Critics Survey (2011 yearbook issue), September 2011
“Richard Siegal’s ©oPirates demonstrates how much (lay) dance talent exists all around us — you just have to look for it in the right places.”
Dancer of the Year by Katja Schneider (Munich, co-editor of Ballet-Tanz Yearbook) Ballet-Tanz International Worldwide Critics Survey (2011 yearbook issue), September 2011
“Richard Siegal is as intelligent a dancer as he is a choreographer.”
Zeig’ Mir, Was Du Kannst by Melanie Suchy K West, Das Kulturmagazin des Westens, Feb 2011
“Lovely to see people are still talking to each other, that not everything is virtual or just on Facebook,” said Siegal, who excludes neither Internet activists and the Pirate Party on Twitter, nor statements dealing with intellectual property rights.”
Piratenparty by Eva-Maria Nagel Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Jan 30 2011
“The true foundation for Richard Siegal’s ©oPirates, which on the surface looks like one big party, is actually theory. Making reference to a plethora of popular topics, he constructs philosophical buildings and references new media, social networks and questions of societal order. Siegal’s choreography is an attempt to reconsider ideas such as, “How is community created and acquired by the world — only to be pirated?”
Tanz Im August by Wiebke Hüster Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Aug 2010
Download audio excerpt as MP3 (2.2 MB)
As If Stranger, Seeing In The Dark by Deborah Jowitt The Village Voice, Jan 15 2008
“Just before the end of this amazing creation, a jerky, slight blurred video materializes — its homemade-looking clumsiness at variance with its technical wizardry. In it, Siegal, miniaturized and visible only from the waist up, appears to be jerkily molding letters out of some substance we can’t see. We read them with difficulty as they ooze up — crooked and of different sizes — in front of him. When each few words are completed, he lifts them as if they’re on a tray, and they float higher to make room for those to come. This is what he has written: “Throw not away the hero in your soul.” A thought in the process of shedding ambiguity. When 55 minutes are up, Siegal matter-of-factly picks up two joined cables and unplugs them. The lights go out.
Sometimes darkness reveals as much as it conceals, and being “in the dark” brings us to the brink of knowledge.”
A Leaf Spinning, Darting and Falling in an Electronic Tempest of Light and Video by Jennifer Dunning The New York Times, Jan 19 2008
“One wonder of this latest solo is how Mr. Siegal manages to keep all the ingredients in balance. There is nothing to hold on to, seemingly for the performer or his audience. But until the dance’s sentimental last message, extraordinarily controlled spastic spins, darts and falls hold their own in a storm of unexpected images; of hurtling, shifting sounds and noodling piano music; and of bromides about individuals and the arts that might have been written by a latter-day Gertrude Stein. …Mr. Siegal is sui generis. It is good — unnerving, but good — to reclaim him.”