Press

"[BESSIE awarded Underground River] is an absolutely glorious exploration of the conscious and unconscious minds, full of humor and whimsical touches as well as an underlying sadness."
Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times
>full article (PDF)

"...who amongst us hasn't flown with Superman or fallen out the humdrum into the arms of Rhett Butler? But what happens when possibilities offered on screen seem more enticing than the ones in real life?"
Sarah Carlson, OFFOFFOFF.com
>full article (PDF)

"Faith Healing is intimate, quiet, at times thrilling."
Susan Yung, Sunday Arts Blog
>full article (PDF)

"The Glass Menagierie scrip has it own powerful magic. Comfort's tactful humor and her glosses on the text do not diminish that, but can make it even more poignant."
Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice
>full article (PDF)

"Mark your calender next time Comfort has a New York engagement, particularly if it's An American Rendition"
Susan Yung, Sunday Arts
>full article (PDF)

"A penetrating new evening-length dance-theatre work,...An American Rendition is dark, biting satire of the ilk that's so brilliantly constructed that it makes you laugh out loud while feeling almost sick inside as you gradually realize the true horror of what you're laughing at."
Lisa Jo Sagolla, Backstage.com: The Actor's Resource
>full article (PDF)

"Aided by her splendid colleagues Joan La Barbara (music), Steve Miller (visual design), David Ferry (lighting), Jung-eun Kim (video projection design) and Liz Prince (costumes), Comfort stiches her disparate materials together with almost faultless theatrical skill."
Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice
>full article(PDF)

"The guiding spirits behind the theater of mixed forms are often choreographers....and Jane Comfort is one of the most fertile minds in this genre."
Anna Kisselgoff, New York Times

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Jane Comfort and Company is a dance-theater group whose work pushes the limits of dance and drama to achieve a new form of theater. An instigator of collaborations across various artistic disciplines, Jane Comfort’s subject material is as diverse as the artists and art forms she employs. What remains constant is her ability to integrate seemingly disparate elements to deliver work that is gripping, inspirational, and unforgettable.

The company has been presented by Lincoln Center’s Serious Fun Festival, The Joyce Theater, Classic Stage Company, PS 122 and Dance Theater Workshop, and Danspace in NYC, The American Center in Paris, Antwerp’s Dance/USA Festival, Actors Theater of Louisville, Jacob’s Pillow, the American Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, The Flynn Theater, and many theaters and colleges across the US. Recent commissions include The Joyce Theater, National Performance Network, American Dance Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, National Ballet of Estonia, Jeanne Ruddy Dance and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

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Jane Comfort Biography

JANE COMFORT is a choreographer, writer, and director who has created over 50 dance theater works for her company since 1978. Her work explores the intersection of movement and text, and has long mixed high and low arts to make social and political commentary. She grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, part of the Manhattan Project, and received a BA in painting from the University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill. She is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow, and received a BESSIE Award for Underground River, a Doris Duke Award for New Work, a Habie Award for distinguished service to the arts from U/North Carolina, and multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts. She also works in theater and opera, and choreographed the Broadway musicals Passion, by Stephen Sondheim, and Amour, by Michel Legrand as well as Shakespeare in the Park’s Much Ado About Nothing and the Off Broadway musical Wilder at Playwrights Horizons. She choreographed Lyric Opera of Chicago’s production of Salome with Deborah Voigt in the title role, which was restaged at the Saito Kinen Festival in Japan last summer. She has had multiple commissions from Ballet Memphis; other recent commissions include the National Performance Network, Rhode Island College, Danspace Project, Performing Americas, The Joyce Theater, Headwaters Dance Company, and Jeanne Ruddy Dance.

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Repertory

Beauty

Beauty, a dance/theater work exploring the American notion of female beauty and its metamorphosis over the last 50 years. Beauty frames the dialogue of the cultural pressures surrounding women’s physique, attire, and appearance around the quintessential icon of American beauty: Barbie. Beauty addresses the plasticity of a variety of “benign” beauty regimens as well as self-destructive habits such as eating disorders and extreme surgeries.

Underground River (25 minutes)

Underground River, winner of the Bessie Award as a "risk-taking and profound theatrical tour de force," is a dance/theater work that explores the rich inner life of a girl who appears to the outer world to be unconscious, or comatose.

Faith Healing

Originally produced in 1993 at PS122(NY) and the presented Off-Broadway at the Classic Stage Company (NY), Faith Healing takes the story line of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie as its point of departure. The issues of nostalgia, regret, fantasy, hope, anger, and unrequited love addressed in The Glass Menagerie are given a vivid and fresh examination through Comfort’s perspective of movement and performance theater. Additionally, the play’s themes of fantasy and nostalgia are embodied by multiple escapes into contemporary pop culture.

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