“Neil Greenberg has said he is constantly exploring meaning in dance and in life—not Romeo-loves-Juliet-and-they-die meaning but how we interpret what we see. The pieces he's made since the early '90s tweak our perceptions and invite us to consider how we process them.  In his wonderful new Partial View live-feed video cameras intermittently project alternative views of what's on stage. The enigmas are compounded by Zeena Parkins' wonderfully apt, silence-studded score; Michael Stiller's lighting effects; and video images by John Jesurun that alternate with the live feed.  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.”

Deborah Jowitt Village Voice, 2005

“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 with the addition of a bird’s-eye shot… The sound and lighting provided exceptionally strong foundations.  Zeena Parkins’ score set an ambiance that shifted from celestial to skittery, couched in a plinking xylophone, plucked harp, vibraphone, and other exotic instruments.  Michael Stiller’s noninvasive lighting bathed the dancers in an aura; “blue-outs” smartly marked scene shifts; and the closing pewter-toned light seemed to have actual weight…  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

“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.”

Apollinaire Scherr New York Newsday, 2005

“Neil Greenberg likes to make our eyes work. We focus tightly on a rotating wrist, then widen our gaze to take in a dancer's whole body as the movement lashes through it. In many ways, he asks us to shift between details and the whole altering stage picture, and to assemble elements on the fly. In his elegant new Two, he increases our options. “

Deborah Jowitt Village Voice, 2003

“The work becomes a fascinating study of two modes of reality: that created by the dancers and that created by the camera’s selective eye.”

Don Daniels Ballet Review, 2003

“Even more impressive was the performance of his 2001 dance Construction With Varied Materials. Here, he creates a sense of simultaneity of dance actions, as though the large sections of the work all take place at the same time and share a common psychological moment, and this without the use of cameras or on-site questioning of illusion and reality: dance as multilocality experience.”

Don Daniels Ballet Review, 2003

“What makes Sequel such a beauty is the integration of sound and silence, movement and, particularly, color and light. The four bodies are glowing elements in clear, shifting formal patterns saturated with warm red and yellow light, without at all losing the look of ramshackle ordinariness that Mr. Greenberg delights in. In both pieces he plays with that ordinariness and the cheesy grandeur of the movie music, continuously juxtaposing the two. The four dancers are remarkably faithful to that difficult strategy. Each has a pleasing, understated individuality that gives the movement texture. Mr. Greenberg is softly dreamy, as if in another world. Ori Flomin moves with a terrier’s tenacity and a fine sense of detail. Justine Lynch has a finicky sensuality straight out of a bodice-ripper romance novel. Best of all is Paige Martin, in whom the choreography seems to well up as naturally and expansively as breathing.”

Jennifer Dunning The New York Times, 2000

“Greenberg has never employed traditional dance partnering in his work, perhaps to make a political point about gender role-playing, and in Sequel the resultant sense of individual and group isolation adds to the evocation of devastating solitude, longing made all the more unbearable by its singularity. Greenberg, like Hitchcock, deals seriously with the inevitable sense of loss that reality can inflict upon the Romantic dreamer.”

Don Daniels Ballet Review, 2000

“Neil Greenberg is the real thing: a thoughtful, playful, skilled, imaginative choreographer who loves to move and who has followed his own path. The result is plenty convincing... The effect of the dances depends upon spaciousness, in every sense of the word. Each one spreads out in time and around the stage (dancers even come and sit at the edge of the stage, their legs dangling). A complex layering of anticipation, loss, and grief accumulates as the music drops in and out in unpredictable intervals, as blackouts further protract the sense of time, and as the self-referential texts introduce a specificity of emotional narrative that shrinks the distance between me and the performers... Greenberg throws himself into the music with an irresistible abandon bordering on camp, his head tossed back like Duncan and Dionysus. His is an ecstatic body, outside itself, reaching beyond its own mortality... What Greenberg gave us was depth of experience and complexity of experience. Pathos infused with irony, the intellect’s sense of humour.”

Ann Daly Dance Theater Journal (London), 1997

“The Disco Project is dazzling in its conception, construction, and execution. The first fourteen minutes are in pure Modern Dance silence, one of this dance’s many ironies. By the time we hear Sylvester’s Do You Wanna Funk?, it is both a relief and an agony, because the relief it offers is insufficient for lifting the emotional mist that the dance by then has already cast - in fact it thickens it... It is the success of The Disco Project as spectacle that makes it so important as art. Greenberg is so in love with the sensuality and organization of dance that he sees everything in its abstractions and expressions. His work - because he is a craftsman and an inventor - is commensurate with his feeling; and his feeling - because he is a survivor - is extreme.”

Rick Whitaker Ballet Review, 1996

“...and then comes Greenberg’s wonderful solo to Jimmy Sommerville’s “Never Can Say Goodbye." It’s a punchy, freeze-framed one-man show, exquisite in its details and consuming in its portrait of clubland agonies and dancefloor ecstasies. Greenberg has given himself many challenges in his solo, and he negotiates them avoiding no risk and evoking an heroic, unique exhilaration... The Disco Project does not seem caught in the past, although accompanying words and music refer to it. The issues raised are present ones, not to be ignored. Here, released, is the master statement that Greenberg’s 1994 work, the memorial Not-About-AIDS-Dance, sequestered in its moonlight-on-alabaster vaults. “Too much has been exacted,” throbs this Project, “but our work has only begun.”

Don Daniels Ballet Review, 1996

“To note that Greenberg is one of the season’s more exciting discoveries is to underrate the cumulative power of this piece... Highly intelligent, emotionally infused dancemaking is rare today. Respect for the sheer craft of linking steps into charged statements is even rarer. And Greenberg offers us all of them in ravishingly expressive and controlled sequences. He has fashioned from autobiography the uncommonly affecting Not-About-AIDS-Dance... In his own manner he mourns; but he subsumes his grief in a tapestry of recalled experiences. He does not cloak himself in the conventional pieties. This, granted, is not the easy way. But it is the heroic way and, ultimately, it is the way of the genuine artist...”

Allan Ulrich San Francisco Examiner, 1996

I gave it one of the three spontaneous standing ovations of my life. It was profound and funny and moving and intensely personal in such a way as to be earth-shatteringly political... But what is most striking and truly extraordinary is Neil’s generosity and sense of inclusion with respect to us, the audience... I am, as viewer, left free to construct the intersection between the intimate information I’m being told and the balletically elegant movement being done in front of me... Although loss and death and even the trauma of everyday life constantly threaten to crush, Neil and company continue to find the energy to push it off just enough to find room to breathe, to create, to love, to make this wonderfully abstract and ridiculous thing called dance... In doing so he locates hope in a landscape of loss.”

Lucy Sexton Juice / a dance and performance journal, 1994

“... the most important and moving choreographic response to AIDS anyone seems to know of... What makes the dance as poignant as it is (rather than pathetic, or just sad) is the dancing. Greenberg danced in Merce Cunningham’s company and learned well how to build a coherence out of movement. The company of five dancers are modern virtuosos and the choreography is serious and beautiful. There is a striving for independence from the unlovely world - but in vain. This tension between carrying on the work of making art and the imposition of apocalyptic events constitutes the shattering center of Greenberg’s Not-About-AIDS-Dance... Greenberg is so in love with the sensuality and organization of dance that he sees everything in its abstractions and expressions. His work - because he is a craftsman and an inventor - is commensurate with his feeling; and his feeling - because he is a survivor - is extreme.”

Rick Whitaker Our Town, 1994

“Yes, of course, this work for five people was indeed about AIDS. Flinty and witty as well as poignant, it proclaimed that dance and life itself can be arts of time... The vigorousness of most of the choreography suggested that, for all its melancholy, this dance ultimately affirmed life.”

Jack Anderson and George Dorris The Dancing Times (London), 1994

“I wonder what Arlene Croce would have made of Neil Greenberg’s Not-About-AIDS-Dance. This is not a work that demands pity for the choreographer. It’s about the process of artistic creation set parallel to the life that’s being lived. ... it’s like a rebirth.”

Deborah Jowitt Village Voice, 1995