[ Lecavalier's] extreme dance, filled with a fiery energy, caught the imagination of a whole generation. * New York Live Arts * Louise LeCavaliers transformative work with La La Human Steps (1981-95) inspired fantastically exciting and innovative dancing and Thompsons study of Lecavaliers work inspires new trajectories for dance history. Drawing on urban studies, poststructuralist French theory, feminist politics and phenomenology, Thompson gives us a vivid portrait of a staggeringly resilient artist. Lecavalier emerges here as an insightful commentator on her life and art and, most crucially, as a brilliant resourceful dancer for more than four decades. Thompsons study, like Lecavaliers dancing, revels in its own capacious expenditure, inviting us to expand dance historys usual discussions of technique and beauty to consider urban life, sweat, love and money. If this is the new dance history, I am all for it. * Peggy Phelan, Ann O'Day Maples Professor of the Arts and Professor of English, Stanford University, USA * MJ Thompson has crafted an extraordinary rendering of an exquisite artist, placing the achievement of Louise Lecavalier within contexts that expand the reach of theatrical dance. Moving deftly through a stunning, precisely-chosen array of contemporary analytic perspectives, Thompson demonstrates how a dance artists career manifests powerful ways to move the world through radical gestures of performance. * Thomas F. DeFrantz, Director of SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology *
