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Dancer + Choreographer |
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"In Wee Hours, a series of delicately drawn works set to nine well-chosen nocturnes (no Chopin), Richard Daniels's dancers filter onto the stage like light coming through a window, accompanied by the pianist Nurit Tilles. In one piece, the dancers move like sleepwalkers, half-awake in Paderewski's fitful night; in another, Dusan Tynek shows the pique of an unsleepy girl who dances to music by Manuel de Falla that ends on a petulant note-echoed by a spirited stamp of the foot. Most haunting is Regina Larkin's performance, set to Poulenc's Nocturne NO.4 in C Minor, which floats between dream and dread. Larkin moves with a gymnast's precision and a dancer's mastery of suspense, extending and stopping every limb just so, with angular yet smooth grace. Karen Young's costumes are colored in a shadowy palette drawn from James Abbott McNeill Whistler's 'Nocturne' paintings. Daniels, who has lived with AIDS for twenty years, says the program's subject reflects 'that moment, in a dark night, of waking up, or passing through-arriving at the dawn'." -The New Yorker "Wee Hours, the highlight of his recent concert... (is) a suite of solos and duets set to piano nocturnes gorgeously rendered by Nurit Tilles and choreographed in collaboration with its distinctive performers. It explores the tenderness, the vulnerability, the unreasoning anger, and the haunting fears that possess the soul when it hovers between sleeping and waking. In the most memorable section, veteran stars Kate Johnson and Keith Sabado evoke the quiet, familiar intimacy of a pair who have long shared a bed. The mood of sweet mutual sympathy is heightened just once by a (literally) soaring flight of fancy. That juxtaposition explains why these creatures of Daniels's imaginations are partners for keeps." -TOBI TOBIAS, The Village Voice "Montrealer Andre Fairfield is blind and New Yorker Richard Daniels is a man living with HIV, but there was nothing pitiable about Vistas, an affecting duet created by Daniels [and Fairfield]. Dancing together, they assisted each other's movements in a way that stressed harmony rather than interdependence. Like Vladimir and Estragon, they made a profound statement about carrying on." -SUSAN WALKER, The Toronto Star 
"Focus and the weight of gesture and stillness were key in (Daniels's) Ghazi. His focused gaze and the time and space he gives to every moment... is rare in dance today. Mr. Daniels suggests how important it is in this handsome, poignant solo." -JENNIFER DUNNING, The New York Times "He performs the solos gravely with great sensitivity-almost as if he were haunted by the music, dreaming it. He celebrates Bernstein's fast-paced jazzy tone with leaps and grabs at the air, and executes big thrusting gestures when the composer turns to histrionics. But I'm oversimplifying; Daniels's responses are always nuanced." -DEBORAH JOWITT, The Village Voice "Music became the breath of life for Mr. Daniels, who began the work sprawled atop a piano and ended it by resting against the piano bench. Knowledge of those (individuals) celebrated by Mr. Daniels or Mr. Bernstein was not necessary. The confident skips and strides of some episodes and the slow bends and contemplative pauses of others were expressive in themselves." -JACK ANDERSON, The New York Times "And then there was Richard Daniels, probably the oldest dancer in the entire festival, whose solo to the music of Beethoven titled Ghazi (Turkish for hero, leader, survivor of war) flowed right. from the music with the utmost economy as if every movement counted." -WILLIAM LITTLER, The Toronto Star - Back to Press |
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Richard Daniels
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