Natasa Trifan Performance Group

BODY MAPS
reviewed by J Grawemeyer in Theater Mania.com

The kind of work I saw in Body Maps, choreographed by Natasa Trifan, is the reason I see theater rather than movies. Theater, whether kitchen-sink drama or performance art, communicates the human experience through performer to audience, helping us figure out who we are and what life is supposed to be about. Body Maps does not answer those questions, but rather presents situations that speak to the search. The piece, anything but kitchen-sink drama, is a totally moving experience.

I was waiting for the lights to dim so the performers could set themselves on stage before I noticed they had been there the entire time, unmoving, cloaked—no, draped!—in white gauze, attached to another performer, a soprano floating in the back corner. The performers-as-set is beautifully disturbing—a giant, perfect cobweb. The soprano's voice fills the room as the performers birth themselves from her. Opposite, the narrator, cloaked in black, separates herself from another performer in red. Once both tasks are accomplished, the lights dim, and the real show begins—dance pieces interspersed with storytelling and spoken word by the narrator and the haunting voice of the soprano. The scenes center around a social worker's interviews, three troubled souls who feel "E-motions" that are manifested through the dancers, whose strong, graceful bodies remind me how beautiful the human body is.

The best scene is that of the dancer (Natasa Trifan) who portrays a child with an alcoholic father. Dressed in a blue tutu, attached to a chair, she dances with the chair as the narrator communicates the story. The dancer is gifted and the scene feels more specific than the others, which are generalized and ask the audience to assume more.

WHITE
Reviewed by Darrah Carr in Dance Insider

Natasa Trifan's premiere of "White" was blissfully free of voice-overs, leaving the audience free to ponder without assistance the tangled encounters of the trio of dancers. Trifan herself began the piece, edging from the stage left curtain while slowly undulating her hips, which were lassoed by an elastic band. She continued her horizontal journey across the stage, as Andrei Garzon and Saar Harari entered from opposite sides. The dancers formed odd couplings as they became ensnared by the elastic or wrangled fiercely with each other. Tension was heightened by Chiaki Watanabe's excellent video projections; most notable was a dizzying collage of geometric shapes. Despite the interesting, albeit fleeting pairings, the overall sense of the work was that these were fundamentally lonely, isolated journeys across the stage and beyond.

BEYOND THE  DMZ
Reviewed by Lisa Jo Sagolla in BackStage New York City

It was “the simpler, the better,” choreographically speaking, in “Beyond the DMZ”, a multimedia dance piece composed and directed by Eun-Hee Kim and performed by her company, Sudden Enlightenment Theater, at Theater for The New City. A depiction of the agony suffered by Koreans who were separated from family members when their country was split into two nations following World War II, the narrative dance production was choreographer by Natasa Trifan.
The sharp, spare choreography Trifan created to portray the political maneuverings surrounding the establishment of the DMZ and the bare actions she developed in expression of the grief felt by the Korean people proved theatrically power and poignant.

The evening's most effective scenes were those that utilized a minimum of movements. The solemnity of a “Funeral” was beautifully conjured be three men processing across the stage repeating one simple movement over and over-basic walking step punctuated by a gentle rock.
“The Yalta conference” featured bigger than life drawings of FDR, Churchill, and Stalin, out of which emerged three male dancers who strategically paced around, bent to study, and then, with great deliberation, drew a line dividing the Korean map outlined on the stage floor. “South and North” was a clever duet for two men separated by a stark white table. With aggressive, angular movements, the dancers protected their turf while threateningly thrusting themselves onto the table into precariously balanced positions, representing cagey intrusions into enemy territory.
The work ended with a scene of touching simplicity: People just wandered about, lost, clutching signs displaying vital statistics and photos of loved ones from whom they continue to search.

BEYOND THE  DMZ
Reviewed by Richmond Shepard in Lively Arts Magazine

"In BEYOND THE DMZ, director Eu-Hee Kim and
choreographer Natasa Trifan have created a
powerful dance piece about Koren history, the separation of North and South, the Koren War, the Demilitarized Zone, and it's impact fifty years later on families who have been separated. This Dance-Drama is well conceived and artistically well executed. The supple, well-trained bodies of the agile dancers in the company, using Modern Dance form, clearly communicate the pain, the joy, the lives of these people. BEYOND THE DMZ is quite moving as, through graceful energetic movement by the nine dancers, sound (by Hyun Joon Yoon), music, costumes (by Tae S. Kim), and light (by Daniel Green) it tells its powerful story of love, separation, search."


SELF DESCEND/SELF DEPARTURE
Reviewed by Gabriela Ciubuc in LiterNet.ro

The performance space
The National Dance Center is a true contemporary stage for dance. Most of the dance performances I have seen in Romania are presented by theater or opera houses that are not adequate to the dance performance necessities. Dancers are usually jammed into small stages, or old baroque stages with heavy curtains and set designs. Compare to these typical surrogate dance stages, the National Dance Center is big and placed lower than the audience's seats. It is clean, modern looking, airy and spacious. I felt that I could breath and truly enjoy the intimate and minimal lights together with the immense vertical stripes of the video projections.
 
Music and dance
I am captured by the music since the beginning of the piece. The music sounds like a strong noise of  tin foils and metal cords strings somehow rhythmically, somehow melodically structured but with an intentional atonal touch.
Natasa Trifan opens the piece in a  shiny dark gray costume made from a pair of voluminous pants and a geometric designed tunic. This costume is an invisible suggestion to the costume of a Sad Harlequin. Natasa's choreography covers the horizontal plane of the stage with plenty of  dragging, twisting and contorted movements.
In parallel with the choreography, on the vertical plane, are three stripes of video projection with Natasa as a nude dancer filmed in the desert. She is with her knees up to her mouth like a fetus. This image slowly evolves first through an arm and later through the entire body into the space.  The same nude dancer hugs something immaterial at her chest and caresses her head with her arms crossed. These gestures look like soothing a great and deep pain, or touching a wound that is very difficult to heal. At the end she stands up and slowly makes some steps on the dry surface of the empty desert.
The video cyclical structure is reflected  in the dance structure. One of the dancers tortures herself and fights with the dark side of the herself and the other (a beautiful black dancer Sandra Mavhima ) in white dress echoes her movements. I think the contrasts of the costumes and dancers make me think of the androgen as a prototype of the self. In the same time on the white screen, the shapes of the video slide down and up asymmetrically reflecting the abyssal searching of the self.
What else I can add to this journey? I can mention the fight between the two dancers with their moods of disgust, powerless, rage and straggle. I can highlight the huge variety of moods and the transitory states of mind suggested by the sand desert projected on the back wall and later inundated by green, marine waters. I can add the contradictory and ambivalent characters played by the two dancers in their wish for abandon, help, and power. I see in these dancers the experience of one can do everything by himself and the disappointed of it, the loneliness matched with the huge loss of a good friend and the revolt of the defended.
The dancer in white dress (Sandra Mavhima) constantly tries to save the other (Natasa Trifan) from her negative moods that are invading her mind and making her impossible to calm down. She gets  overwhelmed by this hopeless process and then the other dancer, like a precise mathematic conversion, suddenly accepts her existence and influence. I enjoyed the choreography and also the music that I couldn't resemble with any other kind of music.