Reviews
"Sanjo's body is a perfectly tuned tool and her practice of her art is so artless as to be like a child at play --- mindlessly maneuvering against impossibility...lovely, marvelously, refreshing performance --- the dance as artist, painter of atmosphere, shaper of lines in air."
Zita Allen, Dance Magazine
November 1975
"Mariko Sanjo's dances have hypnotic intensity extraordinary to the eye...one had the feeling of participation in a weighty esthetic ceremony...the intense feeling of ritual that Miss Sanjo imparts to
everything she does."
Don McDonagh, New York Times
September 21, 1976
"Bird is an extraordinary dance ... totally self-contained, its structure severe...time and place are transcended, and the dance becomes an archetype of feeling."
Robert J. Pierce, The Soho Weekly News
September 30, 1976
"In her beautiful, starkly repetitive Bird, she seems, with fierce concentration, to be listening to something inside her own body, to be maintaining her equilibrium, perhaps, against emotional currents in herself which the bittersweet Casals cello music is stirring up."
Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice
October 11, 1976
"Repetition is a key approach to create a Zen atmosphere so that each piece becomes a powerful meditation on an emotion or an idea...The first time I watch, I'm on the edge of my grief, the second time I'm overwhelmed, and the third time I cry. Tears roll down my cheeks, I feel pain, the pain of missing the people I've loved but who've disappeared from my life...In Sanjo's world, death is a continuum of life."
Jean Nuchtern, New York Women's Week
November 1, 1976
"Mariko Sanjo demonstrated the dynamic possibilities for transforming one person's bit of genius into awesome theatricality...an amazing fusion of modern dance with a peculiarly Oriental sense of ritual and nuance.
Brett Raphael, Wisdom's Child
December 13, 1976
"Sanjo is concerned with the patterns and connotations of the spaces in her dance and makes space more concrete that Western Choreographers do. Perhaps she taught some of us 'how to see space.' Her transitions between moods, movements, and positions bridged a greater distance that I has seen before, diverse elements flowing into one another in a way that masked the act of transition."
Judy Kahn, Aspects of Space in Western Choreography
New York, 1976
"Bird...a vision which conjured up images of all the mythic women of art and literature who appear out of the mist. It was one of the most beautiful, perfect stage entrances I've ever seen.
Amanda Smith, Dance Magazine
May 1977
"Bird is stark and fierce...a dance, like Ulanova's performance of The Dying Swan, about primal physical sensations. It's astonishing to realize how theatrical the dance is."
Tobi Tobias, Dance Magazine
December 1977
"Sanjo's stage presence is powerful: I find it impossible, even unthinkable, to look away...She uses the limitless space of that (Delacorte) theater to lose herself in, energy towards her in invisible lines of force."
Robert J. Pierce, The Soho Weekly News
"Mariko Sanjo's dances tend to be either transformations...or else rituals...populated by Kuroko, the non-actors in Kabuki theater who adjust costumes or manipulate props. You're not supposed to see them in Kabuki. In Sanjo's work, these faceless creatures are malevolent and dangerous, part of some secret society acting out unspeakable ceremonies."
Robert J. Pierce, The Soho Weekly News
December 22, 1977"
"If in Bird we are taken closer to her inevitable encounter with death, in Voice II, ritual, spectacle and nightmare, we witness what may be birth."
Linda Small, Dance Magazine
February 1978
"Sanjo's virtues as a performer have long been her technical brilliance, her sense of theatre and her intelligence. Now age and experience have sharpened these to produce a performance of the greatest purity."
Donald Richie, The Japan Times
November 1983
"She manages to do something far too few Japanese performers do - she uses Japanese ideas and influences but manages to make these universal as well...Such generous, emotionally raw personal performances are rare and are to be cherished."
Terry Trucco, Asahi Evening News, Tokyo
December 1983
"Mariko Sanjo is an extraordinary figure on the dance scene. Trained in modern dance in her native Japan, and in Graham technique - at which she is legendary - in the United States, Sanjo trust through the traditional into the avant grade, acquiring from her significant presence in both camps cult following in the U.S. and Japan."
Amanda Smith, Dance Magazine
June 1985
"Her choreography is an amalgam of East and West that is seamless... and original."
"She danced to a Catalan theme arranged by Pablo Casals with such deliberate pace and intensity that it took one's breath away...Not a single move was superfluous --- and every move was beautiful, exquisitely so."
Dora Sowden, Jerusalem Post
September 1988
"A body that is a spirit...erases every border between the outside snd the inside, between the visible movement and its source within the soul. Such a busy changes the concept of 'choreography.' Every movement is an expression of truth."
Nathan Mishory, Ha' Aretz, Tel Aviv
September 1988
