“Osserman, alone in a spotlight, starts twisting, kicking, and clawing, as if the beast in her were taking over. It takes a while to realize that what she’s growling out and licking her chops over is ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ No more Ms. Nice Choreographer. Powerful stuff. You go girl!”
- The Village Voice
“the piece seemed primal, raw. It built up and seemed like something was going to explode. I want to see it again.”
- HOUR online, Montreal
“Superb…Osserman creates a delicate hybrid of the old and the new.”
- The Boston Herald
“Wendy Osserman’s Udjat and Revertebrata both feature sculptural images and a quirky contortionist sensibility that is oddly appealing…Osserman’s movement transposes the sensual physicality of Latin dance rhythms into something very different, forcing us to look at it with new eyes.”
- The Pittsburgh Press
“Karaktura, a solo performed by Osserman herself, used ordinary and extraordinary movements to interject a fresh and inventive style. . . The Wendy Osserman Dance Company not only gave an anniversary performance. It also introduced an avant-garde style of dance to the Washington area.”
- THE EAGLE, Washington D.C.
“Osserman finds cosmic implications in personal experience.”
- The Village Voice
“One piece stands out particularly, a solo that joins dance to stand-up comedy, containing the artist’s utterly savory soliloquy and as much physicality as you could wish for. It is as if Lou Reed had been a choreographer.”
- ICI Montreal
“Wendy Osserman winds her dancers around each other, like restrained acrobats supporting their partners. The dancers appeared to be born, to meld, to form a totem pole.”
- The Daily News (McKeesport, PA)
“A kinetic sculptress…This lady’s a remarkable performer…innovative and with an ability to make phrases appear freshly minted and gleaming.”
- The Jewish Journal
“Osserman has been making eccentric and original work since the nineteen-seventies.”
- The New Yorker
“Repeatedly the kind of support on view defines the emotional relationship depicted between the performers. In formal terms this seems to be Ms. Osserman’s governing idea and it is a sophisticated concept…These are studies in emotion as well as motion…a welcome fresh note.”
- The New York Times
“program of well-made expressionistic dances…(a) winning evening”
- Backstage
“A woman of taste and talent…She comes up with some fine images…Osserman is splendid in State, making us see invisible forces tugging at her steps.”
- The Village Voice
“Wendy Osserman is an engaging actor and dancer who moves with elfin lightness.”
- The New York Times
“Osserman is possessed of surprising lyricism… The entirety of Osserman’s work was so finely orchestrated…the fullness of feeling made the fullness of the Dance.”
- Dance Magazine
“Osserman finds cosmic implications in personal experience.”
- Gus Solomons Jr., The Village Voice
“Wendy Osserman turned seventy the year I asked her to dance in an evening length piece I was making with my company. She is a lithe, strong, supple woman who warms up, rehearses, choreographs, and performs just like any of the other dancers in the room. The only difference is that she is about forty years older than most of them. Wendy doesn’t seem to notice this, and why should she? She is slim, upright, quick, and alert. Her dancing is playful, quirky, and considered. Why is Wendy still dancing and performing professionally, while most of her generation has long since ended their performing careers? What about her story has made her reside here in this work for fifty years, continuing to enter into a game of the body? Mostly, I believe, it is that she is still fascinated by movement, has something to say, and physically has the facility to say it.”
- Rebecca Stenn from "A Life in Dance, A Practical Guide" by Rebecca Stenn and Fran Kirmser.
“Ms. Osserman has been creating dances since the early 1970’s, but there is nothing old-fashioned about “Out of Place,” made in collaboration with the Czech composer, violinist and singer Iva Bittova. In fact, the work if provocative precisely because it feels like a new amalgam of some indefinable kind. Ms. Osserman uses Ms. Bittova as a force of nature in the work, and whether singing, growling, mumbling, or clucking, her presence seems to bloe the six dancers one way or the another, cause them to coalesce in groups or scatter, or evoke odd animalistic gestures and behavior. Ms. osserman uses folk-inspired steps — there is a lot of skipping and circling, and a sense of earthbound impulse — that is sometimes reminiscent of Mats Ek’s faux-naïve movement style. But she also incorporates awkward gesticulation with angled shoulders and extreme facial contortions, at moments. (a mesmerizing solo by Ms. Osserman; another a lovely duet for Aya Shibahara, who also designed the attractive drapey costumes, and Vistoria Lundell) The strangeness of the otherworldly music and the odd grimacing and gesturing are alienating. Yet in all of that there is a king of magic, a sense of being taken to a place you might never visit again.”
Presented March 2018 by Theater for the New City, Crystal Field, Executive Director, 155 First Avenue, NYC
“The veteran choreographer Wendy Osserman unveils her latest evening of work — with a group of talented dancers, including Joshua Tuason and Cori Kresge — that features the premiere of ‘Undermine.’ Inspired by the current political climate, it draws on concepts from the Native American medicine wheel and features music by Skip LaPlante, who creates scores for traditional and homemade instruments. Also included is ‘Udjat,’ a trio from 1985.”
- New York Times
“It had the shifting, crepuscular feeling of something you caught a glimpse of in half-light, down the hall, reflected in a mirror.”
Presented April 2016, presented by Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue, NYC
“bountiful work, richly textured with visual, aural, and physical collaborations. Projected designs by Sanya Kantarovsky, lively arrangements of color and shape reminiscent of Matisse’s cut outs, set a scene. Each projection brings to light a new environment making the stage into an ever-changing forest of sorts, where the music and dancers — the flora and fauna of each locale — constantly arouse our attention and curiosity.”
- The Dance Enthusiast
“Four dancers cycled through solos, duets, and the group, each dancing with a distinct, individual style although still easily moving harmoniously with one another, their movements appearing to flow entirely naturally from their body, with a complete freedom”
Presented April 2014 by Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue, NYC
“An Enigma, Bound by Chaos, Staged by a Veteran Choreographer.
Any opportunity to see the dancer Cori Kresge is welcome. When she was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Repertory Understudy Group, her steely, sensuous strength and staggering facility made you question her status as an “understudy.”
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In works by the Cunningham alumni Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, she has been just as incisive, if more animal, almost otherworldly, in what seems like her insatiable need to be dancing.
On Friday at Theater for the New City, Ms. Kresge brought those virtues to Vestigal, a new, hourlong piece by the veteran choreographer Wendy Osserman, who has been presenting work in New York since 1976. The premiere marked Ms. Kresge’s 10th anniversary with the Wendy Osserman Dance Company, and evidently it has been a fruitful decade…As a performer, Ms. Osserman, who is (hard to believe) in her early 70s, has her own kind of magnetism. ‘Who wants to be vulnerable, really?’ she asks during a monologue about, of all things, trilobites. Just by saying that, she shows that she’s willing to be."
Presented in 2012 at Hudson Guild Theatre, Chelsea, NYC
“With the premiere of Compromised at the Hudson Guild Theatre, Wendy Osserman Dance Company explores the polarization of the political stage through an evening-length work created by Osserman in collaboration with four dancers. Set to musical arrangements of Eric Satie and drummer Victor Lewis, the score also includes interviews with people representing both right- and left-wing viewpoints. The tone of the performance is generally light and breezy; Osserman manages to avoid treating this over-wrought subject with a heavy hand.
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As a soft hum of jazzy drums starts to play, dancers Milan Misko and Cori Kresge enter from the back of the small theater, heads bobbing like chickens, eyes alert, scanning the scene. Both dressed in dark suits, Misko takes the lead as Kresge dutifully echoes his movements—the image of an eager campaign aide comes to mind… Osserman herself appears several times throughout the piece, often accompanied by text that pits progressives against conservatives; this ideological split is reflected in the lighting, which alternately illuminates and darkens halves of the stage. As if trying to guide the discussion, Osserman stands center stage, directing traffic with her hands before finally giving up; apparently the effort of making opposing sides listen to each other is just too much.
Osserman’s movement follows the light, improvisational vein established early in the piece; it often appears that her body is making its own decisions about what it wants to do—sometimes she tries to control it, and sometimes she just goes with it."
Presented May 2009, Wendy Osserman Dance Company featuring Iva Bittová in association with Joyce SoHo, New York
“more engages and flows from the beginning. It’s light, humorous and eccentric, with moments of mild cacophony, delighting and providing, as Stein did in her own day, unexpected pleasure.”
Presented March 2008, Wendy Osserman Dance Company featuring Iva Bittová in association with the Czech Center NY
Hudson Guild Theater, 441 West 26th Street, NYC
“Looking statuesque in an enigmatic solo, Osserman may have been a maternal protective presence before she sank feebly downward, only to be revived by Bittová’s violin music.”
- New York Theater Wire
“provocative precisely because it feels like a new amalgam of some indefinable kind… There is a kind of magic, a sense of being taken to a place you might never visit again.”
