Review Roundup: Preeti Vasudevan's STORIES BY HAND at New York Live Arts - What Did The Critics Think?

STORIES BY HAND ran through November 4 at New York Live Arts. It was created and performed by Preeti Vasudevan in collaboration with Paul Kaiser.

STORIES BY HAND is a solo work searching for an individual identity through stories which are personal, mythical, and social, narrated through the continuous placement and displacement of gestures affected by memory. The work takes the hand gestures of Bharatanatyam (classical Indian dance) as the basis for a storytelling dance-theater interweaving east and west, past and present, the mythic and the everyday.

Let's see what the critics had to say!

Siobhan Burke, The New York Times: At her wildest, Ms. Vasudevan swirls and skids through white flour she has laid on the ground, propelled by a recording of roaring drums... Yet it's her simpler gestures - like the slow, deliberate action of feeding her grandfather, as she recalls spending time with him in India - that say the most.

Jerry Hochman, CriticalDance: Vasudevan tells her stories by incorporating Indian, Tamil, and Hindu references seamlessly, similar to the way people fluent in multiple languages can move from one to another and back without hesitation. And her language skills are other-worldly: she speaks English better than those born to it, with a lilting refinement that's not so much patrician as pleasantly eloquent. She jokes about how she learned English early in the piece, but her tone, diction, and language attitude is part of what makes Stories by Hand as engaging as it is.

Photo: Pavlos Mavridis

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