"Ms. Rose looks like a tall, gaunt, punk version of an ancient Egyptian queen."

- Jennifer Dunning, New York Times

"Her profile reminds one of Edith Sitwell; the strong turban, stylized mask-like face, long nose; Kathy Rose could be the younger sister of the English poet."

- Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung

"with Mary Wigman's male silhouette, Alexander Sacharoff's profile, or Gertrud Bodenwieser's decorative strength."

- Courier, Vienna.

"...the brunette has the kind of elongated features Modigliani loved to paint."

- Philadelphia Inquirer.

"With an extraordinarily expert and precisely determined combination of film, costume, dance and music...she draws her public into dreamworlds, where the limits of gravity, scale, and bodily boundaries dissolve."

- Neue Zurcher Zeitung - Zurich

"In its lavish and unusual ideas and images, this is a project that leaves no wish unanswered...It is a performance that enriches the genre of the "moving image" into a category of the "living image"...

- Neue Zeit, Graz

"...lastingly impressive...a deeply moved audience experienced the dream-like journey of a figurine brought to life...The images run like india ink on celluloid, the pro-jected levels of which melt into sheer four-dimensionality."

- Badische Neueste Nachrichten,Karlsruhe

"Live performance and projections have shared the stage with varying effects, for at least 60 years. Kathy Rose has made this hybrid ground her home, and her work points to a kind of new stage metaphysics where different levels of reality and irreality interpenetrate, transforming them both. Strange territory indeed, but she's a guide I trust and want to follow."

- Philadelphia Inquirer

"Angular and dark, Kathy Rose turns heads as she registers for her hotel room. Her thick black hair thrusts out in a chin-length wedge and her big brown eyes are smudged in charcoal pencil. She wears a floppy purple sweater with a black neck from which her own pale porcelain neck and thin face emerge like a heron's. In profile, her features give her the look of a figure carved on an Egyptian tomb."

- Richmond News Leader

"Even her hair is impatient - dark, short, cut severely, possessed of the need to fall femme fatale style over her left eye whenever the spirit moves. Mystery hair. Dangerous hair. Hair you wouldn't trust at midnight in the fog on the deck of a tramp steamer bound for a port where they sell diamonds below wholesale."

- Philadelphia Daily News

"Like Sarah Bernhardt or other early silent-film stars, Rose has a generous featured face that projects across a theater and holds its own against much larger images."

- Philadelphia Inquirer.

"A Kathy Rose is a Kathy Rose is a......a Red Grooms Nefertiti; a Loie Fuller flame; a Metropolis being in transference; a Brancusi melt-down; a metamorphic arthropod/Invaders from Mars/Them!; an Oriental swatch of Bakst; a perfumed puff of St. Denis smoke; an Art Deco Dovima; Mary Wigman and Margaret Hamilton in hell; a mini-De Mille extravaganza directed by Max Fleischer; a...

'I'm a visual artist.' states Kathy Rose simply. And simply put, she is a performance artist who combines dance and film animation...In a recent New York performance of her Kabuki-Menco Visual Theater, Rose smashed barriers between drawn and real movements, while mixing and matching - with the gleeful abandon of a sorceress stirring a pot - dances from Japan, Spain, and Bali with German expressionism, Denishawn exoticism, science fiction and cartoons. 'Visual astonishments', marveled the New York Times about Rose's flesh-and-blood-and film fusion celebrating metamorphosis and magical transformations...Rose fearlessly integrates different artistic disciplines in innovative and visually rich spectacles. In seeking ' to make a live thing far more visual and a visual thing far more alive ' she reveals unexpected beauty in the cross-over of two dimensional sources, such as graphic design, film animation, and fashion, with the three-dimensional realm of live performance."

- John Canemaker, PRINT MAGAZINE

"Whoever enters into her art, she leads into an illusionary world of colors and chapes, of movement and sounds beyond space and time. Where does the illusion end, where does the reality begin? That is sometimes hard for the spectator to separate - and exactly in that lies the mysterious and thrilling attraction of the pieces...At the end of such an evening the audience wakes up as if from an enchantment."

-Tanz Aktuell, Germany

Best Ultra Strange Performance

"From sci-fi Balinese insect queen to Kleopat'Ra wandering in the desert night, Kathy Rose offered moments of transcendent strangeness and visual wonder in her March performance last year. Working with her own animated and filmed images projected on herself and other dancers, the New York-based Rose is evolving a highly individual performance voice that, I believe, is headed for greatness."

1997/.98 - Best of Year/ Philadelphia Weekly.

"It's hard, very hard, to describe the experience of watching a Kathy Rose performance... Turbaned and robed in a coppery, glittering fabric, she held us in thrall to the molten ripples of her costume. The centrality of her tableaux, inherent in her projection technique, also gives them a hieratic, hypnotically compelling power."

- Miriam Seidel, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Being a loner can be a scary business. If you are trying to create something you've never seen before, then there are no rules to follow. If you're also trying to break with your own past, then another set of comforts disappears. You have to be stubborn, and animator-turned-filmmaker-turned dancer/filmmaker Kathy Rose is stubborn...Accustomed as we are to a continual flow of innovations in video, Rose resurrects our respect for the chameleon possibilities in film while stunning us with her bizarre, hypnotic showmanship."

- Dance Magazine

"Fantastique Kathy Rose! Here at last is an artist who innovates, brings a breeze of fresh air and fantasy...With geometric precision she inserts herself into a stupifying fantasmagorie."

- Tribune de Geneve

"Daring dance events are nothing new at the Painted Bride Art Center, the city's prime outlet for experimental culture. Yet last night's program is more than daring. It's amazingly odd, peculiarly powerful and weirdly effective. It is, to be certain, a wonderfully bizarre amalgam of dance and avant-garde cartoons that is altogether different from the usual modern dance performance."

- Philadelphia Inquirer

"Kathy Rose is the most important choreographer/film animator working today integrating projected images and live stage action."

- Donald McDonaugh, Author, Martha Graham, Managing Editor, Ballet Review.

"The only way to describe it is to imagine watching the most incredible 3-D movie you've ever seen, or maybe sitting in The Museum of Modern Art while the largest, most colorful paintings come to life before your eyes. Any way you look at it, it was one of the strangest, most fascinating performances to take place in Columbia this season...She times her moves so beautifully that the lines between image and reality disappear, and the audience becomes capturerd under her spell...The entire performance was, in a word, exciting - the kind of eye-opener an audience won't easily forget."

- The State

"It's impossible to "get ready" for Kathy Rose. She is just too disarming. After the glow of the projection screen dulled and the lights went up in McAllister Auditorium Saturday night, it was clear that her impact had far from gelled in the collective mind of her audience. Nor has it, I must confess, totally penetrated my mind. I find myself still visualizing the enormous multi-colored rhomboids that pulsated behind her in time to syncopated splash sounds and other synthesized effects...No wonder she is so provocative, so extraordinary, and even more importantly in the world of the avant garde, so unforgettable."

- The Sunday Express-News, San Antonio

"Kathy Rose has realized every choreographer's dream...she is the answer to the decades-long gap between choreographers, who generally understand precious little about film techniques, and filmmakers, who are often guilty of acts of barbarism like the cutting off of dancers' feet. Rose sees and knows both sides and the result is work which is inventive and un-gimmicky. She's not showing us a trick whose interest quickly wanes; she's exploring a new way to dance."

- Boston Globe

"One of the best dance performances of the year...Kathy Rose, the brilliant choreogrrapher and animator from New York who dances in front of her own films, repeats a program which sold out last fall. Blending her two media, Rose creates bold, abstract patterns where dancer and film become a single unit of motion. Her work is a must-see for anyone interested in either dance or film."

- Boston Globe

"A maker of animated films as well as a choreographer, Miss Rose celebrated metamorphosis and delighted in visual and kinetic magic. The result was an evening of wonderment."

- Jack Anderson, New York Times

"An evening of her works is like watching the grand finale of a fireworks display. Dazzling visual images bloom out of what seems like nowhere. They change, surge, reappear, and amaze. From this six-work concert you get the sense that anything can happen. Because it does."

- The Cincinnati Enquirer

" 'My first thought was Kathy Rose for this one.' Bonney explains. 'She works so seamlessly between cinema and reality. She eliminates distance; one of the best people to animate a whole room. She's a filmmaker who also performs in front of the screen. She becomes a living entity within the context of a cinematic vision. Her costuming is out of this world, every detail of style is unified. Costume, cadence, color. It's dreamlike revery. Her vision is so strong. It's that magic in a black box'"

-Anney Bonney/Performance Curator at The Kitchen. The Villager.

"Kathy Rose defies labels.

She is often categorized as a choreographer, but in fact the choreography is a vehicle used in the service of visual art, a form that more accurately describes her work than does dance...The result, whatever one wishes to call it, is captivating...Due to badly timed car trouble, this reviewer can comment only on the latter half of the hour-long work. However, even a midperformance arrival did not detract from the enjoyment of this astoundingly beautiful piece."

- Durham Morning Herald

"Because few contemporary choreographers mix media as passionately and to the same ends as does Rose..it might be useful to describe her work in terms of a more famous choreographer. Think of Alwin Nikolais, and the magical abstract pictures he makes with costumes and lighting, and you get some idea of what Rose is up to. A better but more esoteric comparison would be a cluster of Soviet and German visual artists in the 1920s and 1930s, who used fabulous geometric costumes as a way of transforming their bodies into animated abstract paintings."

- Nancy Goldner, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Her theater brings to mind the innovations of Oskar Schlemmer's early Bauhaus Theater experiments with light, costume, and movement, as well as those of Alwin Nikolais, who during the sixties and seventies, crafted his own multimedium productions. Both artists were as unconcerned with steps as she, but neither placed himself as dead center in the middle of the work as Rose does."

- Donald McDonaugh, DANCE INK

"Why do choreographers return so infrequently to film? And especially to animated film? The performance that the American Kathy Rose presented at the Salle Patino attested to the need, and even more, to the formidable capacity of projected images to enter into dance. Since Alwin Nikolais, rare are the choreographers who call upon the resources of the 7th art. The young generation turns more willingly towards video... Whereas the animated images, more tame, put themselves at the service of the dancer. The performance gains an astonishing dynamism, and in the case of Kathy Rose, a delicious fantasy."

- Jean-Pierre Pastori, Geneve

"Kathy Rose is a true original."

- Washington Post

"Kathy Rose is pioneering a new dance genre."

- Dance Magazine

"Animation, dance, and sound effects add up to a flabbergasting illusion..This show is an oasis in the highly boring desert of post-modern dance."

- Abendzeitung, Munich

"...colorful, dynamic, sensual...All efforts at description remain far below the professional level of the show."

- Saltzburger Nachreichten, Austria.

© 1999 Kathy Rose - kleo@bway.net

photography by Michael Langsfield

web design: Elinore Burke - elektra@rocketmail.com