In Partial View Greenberg plays with perspective by presenting viewers with his sensual and rigorous dance language performed both onstage by four dancers and in live footage that offers multiple viewpoints of their bodies. Adding yet another layer are prerecorded images by John Jesurun, juxtaposed with the live video on two screens. The use of changing points-of-view challenges viewers to create their own logic, teasing the mind into a provocative dialogue about how we build meanings—in dance and in life.  As in much of Greenberg’s work, Partial View walks the tightrope between looking at “the thing” and simultaneously being “the thing,” juxtaposing a deadpan cool with heart-on-sleeve expression.

Greenberg’s collaborators for Partial View include MacArthur recipient John Jesurun (video) and longtime collaborators Zeena Parkins (music) and Michael Stiller (lighting).  Partial View brings together four “Bessie” Award winning artists.

The program also features partial view solo, in which Greenberg dances to an original score for acoustic harp by Zeena Parkins. The Los Angels Times describes Greenberg’s performance as “Petrouchka unplugged, his bent legs on the verge of collapse in this prelude that heralded the arrival of the extended storm-tossed quartet.”

Partial View premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in New York City.

(50 minutes, four dancers)

Video: John Jesurun
Music: Zeena Parkins
Lighting: Michael Stiller
Costumes: Liz Prince & The Company

“Partial View is stunning.  Neil Greenberg's perspective on the human body and movement looks sublime at every whip, turn and angle.”

“With Partial View, Greenberg transcends the limitations of the proscenium stage and stationary seating.  By projecting live footage of the dancers, Greenberg lets the audience see the dance in dozens of different ways.… His approach in Partial View asks the audience to choose what to look at -- a dancer's back or a close-up of his torso, with every breath magnified; a dancer's giant hand on the screen or her quiet gestures on stage; the shadows beneath a dancer's feet or the movement of his hips and shoulders.  The addition of multiple perspectives creates a richer, yet somehow more mysterious whole… It's an intimate and disarming experience.”

Tresca Weinstein Times Union (Albany)

 “For Neil Greenberg, art's relation to life is an urgent concern.  The tremendous Partial View points simultaneously inward and beyond itself… Zeena Parkins' propulsive score of African-style drumming, scale- traversing marimba, lyrical flute and sudden patches of silence complements without mirroring the dancers' highly specific ruminations…. What makes one linger especially over the dancers’ pauses is the multidisciplinary artist John Jesurun's live video. He has placed cameras at the corners of the stage and overhead, and live sequences of the dancers appear intermittently on the two back-wall screens. We see them as if at the end of a long corridor, through a keyhole or from far overhead. Their helpless rescaling eventually makes a deep sense of their moments of stillness, when they take in the distance. Everywhere they turn becomes their destiny.”

“The perspectives become deliciously complex, foregrounding this movement, dwindling that one, creating tensions that we don't notice between the live performers; it's enough to set our minds jangling. … Greenberg is presenting us with a whole creation about partial views, while reminding us that we never have more than partial views of our lives.”

“Neil Greenberg’s Partial View is an experimental laboratory rich with movement, patterning, and perceptual games… Suddenly we saw the same phrase prismatically—live and from two sides.  A dancer stared at us from the screen, but she was actually glaring away from us, toward the camera.  Perceptions scrambled rapidly and engagingly… Greenberg’s intellectual approach to dancemaking made for a rewarding evening resulting in rich visual and kinetic crescendos. He and his collaborators posed many rhetorical questions, answered them, and then asked more, engaging the audience in a wordless but rousing dialogue.”

Susan Yung Dance Magazine, 2005

“Most of the recent dance-video projects have resulted in little more than sound-and-light shows, but Neil Greenberg’s Partial View constitutes a substantive employment of mixed media…  The ending of Partial View is a return of calm after a storm of detailed ferocity.  In its cool way, the dance has been unsparing.  Greenberg has chosen a primal subject—the relation of the individual to impersonal energies both natural and psychic—and then he has arranged an immense exposé of our adjustments and struggles before such powers.  What is fascinating is the objective passion of the report.”

Don Daniels Ballet Review, 2006