PUBLIC IMPRESSIONS
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"Butler is a young American choreographer on the rise, and one can see why. Her movement is quite original as she makes the body express itself in intriguing ways — shudders, shimmies, flexes, outthrusts, isolations — a sort of shake, rattle and roll, so to speak. It is also slow and deliberate so the audience can see the body movement in great detail."
"Butler engendered a piece in which the ballet’s dancers share the stage with a live string quartet (Aaron Schwebel, Jamie Kruspe, Joshua Greenlaw and Olga Laktionova) that shifts on its platform across the stage as they play American composer John Adams’ John’s Book of Alleged Dances (1994), creating a spectacle of red-hot, sexy and sassy dance, at once playful and awe-inspiring."
With these two powerhouses teaming up together, Butler and Bias-Daniels say they are betting on an unforgettable show that will leave quite an impression on those in attendance.
“I really want women to see themselves,” says Bias-Daniels. “Maybe what makes me sad will make the next woman happy.”
Butler adds, ”I also hope that men in the audience see it and they’re reflective of how they are helping hold space for women to be big and to be great.”
"In her ambitious and thoughtfully assembled 'Re/Build/Construct (Part I),' Butler takes cues from Plato’s 'Allegory of the Cave' to explore how external structures shape internal landscapes and social dynamics. Recorded passages of the text, increasingly warped as the piece progresses, bookend and punctuate Darryl J. Hoffman’s tension-building electronic score. Resembling windup dolls in their robotic yet elastic motion, six dancers deftly manipulate the walls of Tsubasa Kamei’s set. These lightweight panels begin in the form of a house but come apart to create other kinds of boundaries and enclosures."
"Jesse Obremski, in an early solo, is especially uncanny in his puppetlike physicality, an eerie hollowness possessing his eyes and limbs. As they rearrange their world, sparring and conspiring with one another, the dancers periodically erupt in garbled, frustrated speech that feels less fully realized and integrated than other aspects of the work. Movement is the more efficient and expressive language here, right up to the dramatic culmination, which finds the powerful Jie-Hung Connie Shiau trapped within the walls of the reconstructed house — safe shelter turned imprisonment — and ultimately breaking through them."
Siobhan Burke
The New York Times
Review:
"Exploring Plato and Online Dating, Gibney Dancers Give Their All"
Dance Magazine
The Epitome of Contemporary Cool
Zachary Whittaker
"Butler 'knows she deserves to sit at the table even when it doesn’t welcome her,' says Jie-Hung Connie Shiau, a classmate from Purchase with whom Butler overlapped at A.I.M and Hubbard Street before they both joined Gibney Company in September 2020. 'She’s explosive, she covers so much ground, she eats up space. And now, she is able to capture nuance and subtlety and tenderness, as well. That’s something I’ve seen develop in her.'"
"Gibney says. 'This expansion, with Rena, was about seeding leadership into the field. Watching her work is phenomenal because you don’t just see a strong, self-possessed, confident woman at work. You see equity in the process.'"