"“For Colored Girls” is an assertion of the right to own all of the feelings and all of the colors of experience. It pulses and pulses with life, singing a Black girl’s song. And in Brown’s sublime and supple channeling, we hear Shange with exquisite clarity."
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"This version of 'for colored girls' truly does feel like a choreopoem, Shange’s term for her amalgamation of words, motion and music. (The percussive original score is by Martha Redbone and Aaron Whitby). The seven women on stage are barefoot, and their movement—which draws on African-American traditions including juba, stepping and social dance—feels organic, natural and triumphant."
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"As directed and choreographed by the much-lauded dancemaker Camille A. Brown, this production places an exclamation point at the end of its title, as if to claim that it will punch through every moment of grief until all that is left is celebratory victory. While that approach serves as a pleasant corrective to Lea C. Gardner’s gloom-laden interpretation of the work ― which played at The Public Theater in 2019, with Brown as choreographer ― it does not create much of a throughline between the numerous arias assigned to for colored girls’s characters. Nor does it deepen the meaning of the text. Instead, audiences are presented beautiful pictures and intense moments that smolder in isolation."
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"Not to get too mystical about it, but this impeccably performed, exquisitely choreographed revival manages the same for many of us out there in the dark. Dance, said Shange, allowed her to understand the planet the way “atomic particles experience space.” If that’s so, then atomic particles must love each other wildly. They must always be so grateful to see each other, whenever gravity — or a revival — draws them back into one another’s arms."
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"The vibrant new revival, directed and choreographed by Camille A. Brown, recaptures the show’s pioneering, even radical spirit; it remains a show that stands apart, even as explorations of black experience have proliferated in the theater in the years since."
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"Shange’s fantasia of poetry, dance and stories of confession, defiance, sisterhood and, above all, perseverance, holds a power that’s not been weakened either by decades or the loss of a once startling newness."
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"How is this revival? Moving, for anyone fond of the play, partly because the director and choreographer, Camille A. Brown, has sought to expand the scope of the work, allowing to encompass gender fluidity and deafness. In other words, more people now get to sing its song, which is heartening and affirmative. It makes the audience feel like the text is alive and breathing."
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"Throughout the production, themes of visibility filter through every enunciated breath and rhythmic melody. With the ladies’ natural crowns beautified with box braids, locs and shaped afros, the impressive ensemble of seven performers seamlessly works in tandem to create a kaleidoscope of dazzling Black femininity, making it impossible to look away. Every woman here has a story, a complication or an awakening deserving of an ear. Or several."
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