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“…this is what art is supposed to do—to sock us in the stomach with emotional truths in a way the paper’s headlines rarely can, and to leave us with a little more hope.” – The Santa Barbara Independent, 2003 “Other spoken headlines punctuated ‘Attempts,’ in which Smiarowski and Tom Young performed a postmodern movement cycle, repeated it while describing grim milestones in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and then silently performed it again with those milestones resonating in everyone’s minds at each step. ‘The situation compelled us to make a dance,’ they told us, and even though they judged themselves to be merely ‘faking it,’ the chilling result did represent, in their words, ‘a dance of death for Israelis and Arabs.’” “In ‘Attempts,’ choreographed by Smiarowski and Tom Young and performed by Smiarowski and Nugent, two choreographers struggle to make a dance about political events. The dancers punctuated the combative duet with dialogue and news headlines as their conflict grew increasingly violent….When the dancers began to expose the motivations behind their movements as they danced….the impact was as solid as any image on the five o’clock news.” – The Santa Barbara Independent, 2003 “…a meditative and raw memorial….Smiarowski’s monologue gave a childlike account of these deaths, chilling in its unflinching simplicity.” – The Santa Barbara Independent, 2003 “Smiarowski depicted just one victim in just one terrorist bombing, reliving in her own body and consciousness the moments before and after an incident that killed six people. Bracing against a chair, climbing on it, sinking in it, she achieved a remarkable meditative identification with dying on a bus.” – The Los Angeles Times, 2002
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