Maria Hassabi

At over 75-minutes long, PREMIERE insists you confront your 21st century hyper-stimulation. 

PREMIERE… was an absorbing study in time distortion, an invitation—or a challenge—to experience dance on a microscopic level… it was a dance made of a million premières, and every time someone maneuvered from crouching to standing, or changed direction, it was presented with the solemnity and the elegance of a major event.

The stunning visual composition captured on the first glimpse at PREMIERE is delivered in its fullness to the viewer’s contemplation along the entirety of the piece… Hassabi’s choreography is extreme. It makes the viewer look at those interstices that would not be perceived otherwise.   

PREMIERE is quite literally about turning in from the world, about coming to face an audience, an extended first encounter. Luminous, strenuous, severe—as riveting to watch as it is taxing.   

Hassabi is a master of slowness and stillness – her pieces are like art installations brought to life by dancers.   

Maria Hassabi’s slow, sculptural, exacting work appears in white boxes as often as black: it owes as much to art as it does to dance and theatre. Indeed, [PREMIERE] defines itself in that gap, deriving power and poignancy from the tension between the aesthetic and the theatrical – the art object and the human subject. 

PREMIERE is another fabulously creative, involving, and challenging piece by Hassabi in her continuing exploration of movement, expectation, personal connection, the nature of performance itself, and the endless intricacies of the human mind and body.

The work—an endurance trial for performers and audience alike—is a knockout.

For both choreographers, the key is finding strength from within. It’s extreme.

This was easily the most striking and beautiful new work I saw in Venice.

…in the choreographer Maria Hassabi’s ‘living sculptures,’ whose bodies are draped and stretched across the benches of a sports stadium, brilliantly revealed in the terrific joint pavilion for Cyprus and Lithuania.

…the dancers messed with our desire to know what this art was about, if not what it was worth.

SHOW was a tense, exhausting combination of immersive dance and installation.

While her choreography is pretty out there, she definitely pushes the body into interesting and unexpected directions. She asks compelling questions about the meaning of the observed body and about the dynamic and expectations between audience and performer.

SHOW is a brilliant, often erotically charged evening-length piece performed by two dynamic, brave dancers unafraid to take risks, involving the audience in unique and, at times, demanding ways.

The discipline, constraint and austerity and the ultimate resulting poetry of the work was staggering-with an utter minimum of movement and fiercely conceptual drive, Hassabi managed to transcend dance and approach an art-making that was far more steeped in durational performance/installation.

Hers is a dance that lives between object and movement, a dance that conjures a frame and dares you to resist.

No matter the art form or the intersection of arts that is on focus, when an artist makes very clear and specific decisions something more extraordinary about the content of the work is revealed.

Her cheeks flush, her nose reddens, her eyes almost spill over, her eyebrows quake. She is absolutely experiencing her experiment. It is beautiful.

Hassabi and Steijn were adrift in their own concentration and in each other’s gazes, with the viewers equally entranced.

Robert and Maria covers about 6 sq ft of ground – and lifetimes of feeling. … If Eadweard Muybridge had photographed not a horse’s gallop but feelings growing, shrinking and wavering across body, face and the space between two people, it might have looked like this.

“Robert and Maria” is a dance by degrees, in which the inching closer of angled torsos or the slow joining of hands becomes an act of rich drama… It’s rare to get such an unadorned window into the world of two strangers.

Staggering genius…like the British art duo Gilbert & George…Hassabi eliminated the distinction between artist and art.

…a great collision of grace, tension, grotesqueness, seduction and pain…

The work lasts about an hour of clock time–quite a testament to Hassabi’s vigor and determination–but you might find yourself completely losing track of time.

Hassabi makes her way around the platform with awe-inspiring skill and dexterity, her muscles and veins bulging as her body shakes, often held slightly above the platform by hands that leave disappearing sweat prints on the dark surface.

Ms. Hassabi’s body is astounding…

Gazing at this exquisitely designed living sculpture, you also feel your own body straining with Hassabi, and in the slow friction between these two views, mysterious emotions ignite.

SOLO…[is] really a very different kind of pas de deux … it’s a thrill watching what Hassabi the dancer is capable of.

In her GLORIA (2007) Ms. Hassabi, born in Cyprus, created a powerfully theatrical environment … perhaps she will transport us again.

…smart and subversive Maria Hassabi…

Maria Hassabi’s “Come in my house I want to hurt you!” continued her exploration of the female body as moving sculpture, objectified yet powerful.

The best of 2007…duet for two beauties who never touch…

Maria Hassabi and Hristoula Harakas-two of the most exciting contemporary dance artists in New York-exist alone together in Gloria, Hassabi’s latest work…Both dancers and viewers endure harsh exposure…

A piece of pure theater in which the cumulative effect of their disaffected, sculptural poses was as compelling as it was mysterious.

A double image of two intrepid dancers. The performers are arresting to watch…

Set to the sounds of cars honking and cell phones ringing, Gloria is a slow, haunting walk through a familiar city.

The boundaries between dance, artwork, installation and performance are subtly blurred… every sculptural position suggests unverifiable meaning.

…these captivating performers you want to watch at any given moment.

Hassabi works with an eye catching movement vocabulary

“The dancers movement is eye-popping, pedestrian, and traffic stopping.”