Cardell Dance Theater

Explore dance.com  March 15, 2007

“Quest” by Martha Robinson

Group Motion Dance Theater interprets, expands and transforms the music, melding dance, theater and the visual arts into an engaging and provocative performance experience. Known since its founding in 1968 as a pioneer in multi-media dance/theatre, this diverse company has toured the world and regularly contributed important work to the body of dance/theater pieces.  Group Motion's Manfred Fischbeck and Silvana Cardell choreograph movement to chamber music of renowned composer George Crumb, as well as to a world premiere by Philadelphia composer David Ludwig. Watch the dance while the music is performed on stage by virtuoso guest guitarist William Anderson and the incomparable Network Ensemble, with video by Philadelphia artist Peter Price. Experience this exquisite performance – the result of accomplished artists from different genres coming together to create a brilliant new work.

ballet .Co by Lewis Whittington 

September 2006

Cardell’s ‘Maquinas Simples,’ scored to live liquidy soundscapes by Fischbeck, uses geometric set pieces to carve out scary psychological territory. The dancers, in white gymnastic togs, move out of a group slab and hurl themselves across the floor or jump in each others’ arms and freeze in precarious positions. A square section of the floor is raised and the dancers have to keep moving on a severely slanted plane, perching and swaying against the slide. Then what looks like a wrecking ball swings down and the troupe has to dodge its circular patterns. The effect is hypnotic. Fischbeck’s joyous finale ‘Exitus’ liberates with ‘Denishawn’ style group circles and communal processionals in free-dance.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

by Lisa kraus

  June 8 , 2007

“Rich rewards from second DanceBoom! installment” by Lisa Kraus Silvana Cardell, Group Motion co-director, restaged excerpts from her Machinas Simples (2001). In its dark setting populated by machine-like denizens, it made me think of a police state. Figures are blankfaced, the moves are stripped down, often echoed through clean unisons.  Cardell defies physics with lifts in which the men hoist the women backward in momentary free floats, legs upward. She has dancers perch at the top of a steeply raked square where they use the momentum of falling to sweep their limbs like clock-hands. A swinging metal ball tethered overhead cuts swaths between the assembled dancers, who seem like sheep, easily divisible, going with the peculiar flow.

The Bulletin               June 8, 2007

'DanceBOOM!'

Experiments With Media In  'Illusions Of Space'  by Linsay Warner                                                  

"Machinas Simples," choreographed by Silvana Cardell and danced by six members of the Group Motion Dance Company, returns to slightly more traditional dancing less obscured by multi media, successfully attaining a mood and relating an emotion through the use of a few props used to further express the ideas translated through motion, rather than obscure the dancers by creating confusion. The dancers, dressed all in white, transmit the feeling of a giant living machine, jump-starting and coughing to life amidst steam. Pistons pump, cogs turn and crankshafts roll as the dancers spark into motion in the first section, using their bodies to transmit a mechanical image. The next two sections express mood and emotion through a ramp used creatively to represent various motions of fear; falling, sliding and hanging off the edges, poised to let go, and the final section of "Maquinas Simples" reenacts the terror in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," as a giant silver wrecking ball swings through the dancers' space of movement, creating a path of destruction put in motion by one of the dancers. This section does a very good job of representing the tick-tock of time, destruction and impending doom in an electric and machinic manner, while keeping the audience in aching suspense.