Booking Contact

Jodi Kaplan
246 W. 38th Street, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10018
646-366-0267
email: jhk40@columbia.edu

Paula Josa-Jones/Dancemakers, Inc.
email: josajo@vineyard.net

What the Critics Say...

[ABOUT RIDE]

"There are few who can establish themselves as original creative artists; what Paula Josa-Jones has done in addition to the above is to bring each aspect of the combined arts of equitation and dance into a new and sublime focus."
Carly Simon

"I cannot imagine my life without having seen it."
Sydney Morris

"How can I express the majesty of your performance, the concept and the soul-driven choreography. In The Red Pony Barn, I witnessed a miracle: the connection between horse and woman, the darkened earth beneath hooves and art. I wept when the dancer put her face to Norman's nostrils as if she were whispering to god."
Carol Dine

"The 45-minute "Ghostland," performed by the Josa-Jones company and amateur dancers from Yaroslavl, buzzed with tension and electric, mosquito-like sounds. "Ghostland," as mystical as many of the Russian offerings, exposed the foreign troupe's major advantage: they had solid choreographic grounding."
St. Petersburgh Times

"about Wonderland: . . . she engineers her end-of-this-world nightmare brilliantly. Movement takes ordeal or transformation as its subject; text or song seize the spirit of movement. The vision of life as brutalizing gives the work an almost terrifying energy and turns performers into survivors."
Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice

"One thing about Paula Josa-Jones' performance work is crystal clear - its stunning visual power. Often inventive and unique, her choreography, as performed currently by her superb six-dancer troupe in Wonderland is so clear and uncluttered, so well-articulated, that any of the 45 minutes of the piece could provide a terrific photo op."
The Boston Globe

"Stunning in both construction and execution. . . [Ofrenda is] ultimately as close to perfection as a dance can be."
TJ Medrek, Bay Windows

"It is, in part, the atmosphere that makes her Masque so intriguing. The dancers are zanies, grotesques. A commedia dell'arte troupe from hell. They dance for us: big clunky, pas de chats; they contort like Butoh dancers. You see horrid at the edge of funny, or comedy that has toppled over the edge into nightmare. God knows what beaches Josa-Jones prowls -- dark ones teeming with creepily phosphorescent life."
Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice

"Your two works were stunning -- they took me by surprise and rarely let go. They were psychologically so rich, so devastating, so tasty, so idiosyncratically right, and yet always also so embodied, so full of movement, nuance and conviction. Your company is beautiful, such individuals, so able to give themselves up to ideas and odd moods and flights and each other and your vision. It was also inspiring to see someone take the idiosyncrasy and inner riveting engagement of authentic movement work out of its too often spiritualized and tamed life, and instead, pushes it deeper and comes out the other side with such beautiful and grippingly legible pieces."
Jim Coleman, Chair, Dance Program, Mount Holyoke College

"Ghostdance is an apparition in my psyche everyday. The miracle of your work in my life is this -- other choreographer's works may please me or not, but regardless it remains "on" a screen, on a canvas, on a plane of some kind. My delight in the work of artists other than you can be real and meaty -- it appreciates the aesthetic, the pattern, the whatever . . . BUT . . . what your work does is LIVE in me. . . . it moves in! It moves me. It transports me to that place that IS art where the work and the experiencer become a breathing art-being. My judgment voice, my critic, my "appreciator" get s swamped . . . the experience is simply no longer about viewing . . . about an object . . about an "other" entity . . . the experience IS the dance. Oh, it is that I am DANCED. Your work moves me beyond any consciousness of itself as "art" to the being of art. That's it. WOW. Beyond measuring, thank you."
Kathleen Henry, Boston Liturgical Dance

"Garden is a powerful, eccentric, surreal vision of people in a dazed and terrifying state of innocence. Like many of us, they are only a perilous half-step away from being beasts themselves. But it's being human that makes them a danger."
Burt Supree, The Village Voice

"[Flesh] is a tour de force for seven women in little-girl party dresses and seven chairs in cloth shrouds. Its images of blitzkrieg grab hold and won't let go. "
Thea Singer, The Boston Phoenix

"She serves us up a menu of strange ingredients from her fascinating store of dreams, and leaves us to concoct our own recipe."
Gus Solomons, Jr., The Village Voice

"The most pervading feeling is one of dreams experienced. There is slow motion, stretching to new heights, the flowing and fluttering of whisp dreams, interspersed with fluidity of bodies in motion. Until We Are Bone is an enthralling experience as well as a very funny one at times. I felt as if I were peering into someone else's dreams and occasionally living my own. These dancers have brought Josa-Jones' vision to life and it is a vision indeed. The sets are a gentle tableaux of decay, the lighting is perfect. I really do recommend it...."
Dixie Whatley, WCVB-TV, Boston

"The movement. . . is striking and frequently ravishing to the eye.."
John Engstrom, The Boston Globe

"I've consistently been impressed with the subtlety of articulation she achieves, as well as her ability to embody distinct states of being through movement which seems planned but not choreographed, and is neither classically shaped nor task-oriented. It is a matter of summoning personas and being empty enough at the core to let them live."
David Miller, High Performance

"And when a choreographer pays attention, we have work like Josa-Jones' . She and her extraordinarily dedicated dancers explore boundaries and thresholds that, when pushed, yield an inner-driven, textured composition. One comes away charged and questioning."
Bronwyn Mills, Sojourner, Boston

"This is a fan letter. I think your work is strong, deep, and quite extraordinary. Thank you for such a stirring, puzzling, and restful (all at once!) experience. . . "
Rebecca Blunk, New England Foundation for the Arts