pas de detour

Pas de Detour deals with obstacles, as we experience them in our lives and in the ways they can seemingly detour and derail us. These blocks can be our own emotions, such as fear, or the inevitable unexpected life events. This work for four to six performers physicalizes these ideas, sporting a robust and voracious movement vocabulary that bullets through the space at breakneck speed, hurtling into the air then plummeting to the ground, at the pell-mell pace indicative of modern life. In contrast is a fluid, mellifluous vocabulary that grounds and permeates the chaos of uncertainty and interruption with calm.

“The standout, however, is Ms. Kresge. Over her three years with Cornfield Dance, she has advanced from highly impressive to extraordinary. In “Pas de Detour,” she whips across the space with an amazing combination of absolute control and reckless speed. There’s a cheekiness to how poised she is in seemingly impossible balances, how at ease in high-torsion coordinations of limbs. Those paradoxes are a theme of “Pas de Detour,” which is abstractly about obstacles and finding paths around them.”

~Brian Seibert, The New York Times

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"Friday night’s performance of an excerpt from Ellen Cornfield’s masterful dance Pas de Detour at Settlement House was an amazing tour de force that challenged and rewarded the viewer’s eye. The excellent dancers more than rose to the occasion: (they) executed shape-shifting calligraphic gestures involving flexed and angled elbows, semaphoric arms, and vaulting legs with lightning speed dexterity…. Intricately evolving contrapuntal canons constantly split apart and morphed into unexpected configurations creating a virtual labyrinth of detours, and was danced to an electronic score by Andreas Brade, against a mysteriously muted oneiric filmscape décor with bright, eye-catching costumes by Andrew Jordan.”

~Kenneth King, Author and Multimedia Artist