Declaration of Support from Jasmin Vardimon Company Dancers 1997 – Present

Alistair Spalding – Chief Executive/Artistic Director, Sadler’s Wells

Jasmin Vardimon is working within a contemporary dance practice that can be traced back to Pina Bausch and the Tanztheater tradition. A European approach to dance making – the performers on stage are developed flesh and blood characters rather than neutral bodies that are used in a sculptural abstract way. Jasmin’s characters are real people who, although usually somehow on the edges of society, represent aspects of what it is to be a human being right now. Jasmin’s vocabulary allows her to go down this path as her dancers speak, act, sing. But when it is not possible to go any further with any other kind of language Jasmin’s dance takes over to express the inexpressible, to utter the unutterable, to communicate in a direct way with the movement of the human body.

Catherine Wood – Curator, Tate Modern

Jasmin Vardimon brings a unique combination of sculpture, theatre and dance to her choreography. The set design and conceptual script for JUSTITIA pull our understanding of the dancers movements back and forth between pure, high energy physicality and narrative: between a theatrical experience that is in the moment and one that is revealed through a passage of time, threaded through the eruption of textual description.

Vardimon’s dance language is compelling in its directness as it is witnessed by a live audience, but she tests our perception of what ‘liveness’ means by incorporating ways of reading images that we have learned through contemporary video technolgies: fast forward, playback, freeze-frame.  Within the frame of the conventional theatre setting, Vardimon challenges the audience’s perception of the storyteller’s authorial control so that the characters onstage do not tell us anything but present a rich and intriguingly open-ended space of play.

John Ashford – Theatre Director, The Place

Jasmin’s work shone like a lighthouse, sweeping a beam through a full circle of communication and comprehension. Dramatic, dynamic, intricate, illuminating, audiences recognise that she has a subject that’s important to her and – unusually – to them as well. She deals with deep-rooted and common experiences, and has something new to say about them in a dance language that she has invented for the purpose.

Sian Philips CBE – Actress and Patron of Jasmin Vardimon Company

If we accept Christopher Fry’s suggestion that poetry is “The language in which man explores his own amazement” we can surely say that Jasmin Vardimon’s work is truly poetic; in turn dangerous, unpredictable, amusing, revelatory, non-judgmental (and occasionally all of these things at the same time).

There are never many innovators in any field and I would venture that Miss Vardimon is one of the genuine theatrical innovators of our time. With a touch that is sure and yet delicate she guides us as an audience out of our comfort zone. She delivers all that we expect of an impassioned and experienced choreographer that at the heart of her accomplishment is the priceless gift of story telling – the basic plank of all theatre. She combines visual art, music, mime and now speech.

I am one of the ‘non- dance’ members of her audience who have become involved, intrigued and finally enchanted by her work and there must be many like me who are grateful for the opportunity to share in the richness of these performances and who are glad there is so much yet to come from this special, still – young artist.