PRESS KIT
Marie-Christine Giordano (founder) grew up in the French-speaking town of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her formal dance training began late. In 1987, a Swiss scholarship facilitated her study of modern dance in New York City at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. Soon after, she was granted a Merit Scholarship from the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. She completed her Professional Trainee Certification Program in 1993. During that summer she was sent to represent the school at the Vienna International Dance Festival, where she performed her own choreographed solos. With the Martha Graham Dance Company, Ms. Giordano performed in the ballet Panorama at City Center and on tour internationally.In 1996, she was commissioned to choreograph and perform an opening solo for Jean Cocteau’s play The Human Voice at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre, NYC. Becoming increasingly interested in presenting her own works, MCGD first full evening creation - Eve, Eros et les autres - premiered in Switzerland in 2002. The companny has appeared at St. Mark’s Church, 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, BAX (Brooklyn Arts Exchange), the Swiss Institute, and other venues, as well as in Europe.In 2011, Ms. Giordano was invited to join the Joffrey Ballet School Faculty for its Contemporary and Jazz Summer Intensive. With headquarters in Brooklyn, Ms. Giordano maintains a daily teaching schedule, offering an outreach dance program to public school children and classes to professional. The Swiss native continues to love being in New York, settled in “a place where dance moves the world’s people to meet.”
Ms. Giordano’s technique, based on the best principles of modern dance and ballet, develops in her dancers a powerful center, enabling them the freedom to explore the full potential of their physical and artistic expression. The movements combine spirals, spinning, turns, extreme shifts of the weight, slow motion and the capacity to go from total control to total abandon. It offers an exploration of seemingly contrasting elements: from a pure and crisp line to disintegration, from the energy of sound to the power of silence. It investigates the concept of time and timing. Not a narrative work, her new creation in progress, aims at speaking to people’s kinesthetic sensibility and to their humanity.
Click here "Oberon's Grove review of In and Out June 2012"
"She slowly traverses the space with sustained port de bras, using her marvelously delineated dorsal musculature as an expressive instrument....the work certainly has a unique aura, and the communicative power of Ms. Giordano's physique is something to behold."
–Philip Gardner, Oberon's Grove
Ms. Giordano is clearly a choreographer committed to constructing a personal dance vocabulary, –NY Times
“The arresting figure of a platinum-blond, cropped-haired woman holding a strapless dress in front of her naked body boded well for the Marie-Christine Giordano Dance Company’s ‘Nurtured or Neutered’, which opened at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center on Thursday night. As Marilyn Monroe’s languorous rendition of ‘She Acts Like a Woman Should’ wafted through the air, the woman — Ms. Giordano herself — gradually crumpled her body into a crouch, a quizzical expression on her fine-boned face”...
&ldquo,.. early on in the piece, two women roll over each other’s bodies, pushing off the floor to create angled shapes, entangling in ways that could be an amorous encounter or simply abstract. Later to jazzy soundtrack, Mr. Villanueva performs a leaping solo that exploits his supple leg extensions and nimble attack”...
–NY Times
“Miss Giordano’s intensity was admirable.”– NY Times
“Marie-Christine Giordano’s ‘Low Feed’...was an exploration of differing textures of dancing.”– NY Times
La Liberté
“...dans un souci à la fois d’esthétique et de sincérité, Marie-Christine Giordano privilégie une qualité de mouvement, une fluidité totale qui impressionne...... À la fois aériens et terriens.”–La Liberté
Translation:“...with a special concern for both aesthetics and sincerity, Marie-Christine Giordano emphasizes a movement quality, a total fluidity that is impressive...... Simultaneously airborn and grounded.”
“Elle offre l’essence dramatique d’un language personnel qui, on l’espère, sera montré sur d’autres scènes de Suisse.”–La Liberté
Translation:“She offers the dramatic essence of a personal language that we hope will be presented in other Swiss venues.”
