EARLY WORKS

Paula has created over 30 dance works both for her own company and commissioned works for college dance programs, including In Visible Light, At the Edge of the Garden, Until We Are Bone, Skin, Flesh, Ashes Ashes, Edge, Wild Moon, Tongue, Skin Meat Bone, Light and Bone (Luz y Hueso).

  • "At the Edge of the Garden is a powerful, eccentric, surreal vision of people in a dazed and terrifying state of innocence. Like many of us, they are only a perilous half-step away from being beasts themselves. But it's being human that makes them a danger."
    Burt Supree, The Village Voice

  • "At the Edge of the Garden seems to be a deathwatch version of Stephen Sondheim's current Broadway musical mixed into a mimed performance of the madhouse drama "Marat Sade". The quartet of performers deserve the medal of honor for courage and risk-taking."
    The Boston Globe

  • Light and Bone: (Luz y Hueso) "Your magnificent choreography infused the dead and myself, who had died, with life. I still feel your body moving mine. I hear my words deconstructed. I see the slides, the woman with crossed arms in whose bones I imagine living. Your performance expanded to a symphony for the dead. It reduced to a prayer. It was the essence of a poem."
    Carol Dine, author, Light and Bone and Places in the Bone: A Memoir

  • "What did me in was Luz & Hueso. It was more than brilliant, with its use of film, light and bone, skin, wit and the sepulchral charm of Augustin Lara's voice singing something about mujer, and "todo tu ser parece temblar como una cancion?" or some such, while his voice has so damn little living temblar left in it. I find myself sputtering, and wishing I could see it again."
    Juan Alonso, author of Killing the Mandarin

  • about Flesh
    "This finely crafted, discomforting, even brutal dance is a tour de force for seven women in little girl party dresses and seven chairs in cloth shrouds. Its images of blitzkrieg grab hold and won't let go. The women enter one by one, flatfooted, leaden, as if traveling through mist, each with a lit cigarette (a smoking gun? for what crime? war?) dangling from her fingers. They lower themselves, tentatively, into the chairs, their rumps barely touching, as if the seat were too hot. Guttural sounds and snippets of yearning in a Babel of languages explode from their throats. Later, in a passage hot as fission, they fling themselves from the chairs as if rebounding from a gunshot and smash to the ground - they don't so much fall down as fly up and crash-land. They scramble repeatedly atop their seats, again letting fly - in unison, in canon, finally helter-skelter. It's as if they were forbidden to rest."
    Thea Singer, The Boston Phoenix

  • "In Visible Light is stark, bold and complex, rich in emotional texture and metaphor. It shifts fluidly between childlike wonder and curiosity and full-blown adult passions of lust and violence erupting from unconscious quagmires with nowhere to go but out."
    Bay Windows

  • ". . . uninhibited, demonic and wonderful."
    Tony Angarano, The Hartford Courant

  • "In Wild Moon Josa-Jones bypasses the linear history of oppression embalmed in language and goes straight for the jugular - or the solar plexus. We are reconnected, in browns and blacks and reds, to the essence of our womanliness - as depicted by Josa-Jones, strong, muscular, sexual and sensual gestures that come from the earth and our spiritual gut. What was most gratifying was to see that chthonic imagery is so durable, that it is indeed a part of our women's subconscious, our collective unconscious, and that it speaks to such an essential, unifying part of us."
    Bronwyn Mills, Sojourner

  • "Kin is especially arresting for its odd movement vocabulary, its superbly primal performing."
    Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice
    "There must have been some inbreeding involved with the three feral street urchins of Jones' powerful Kin. In tattered clothes and punk make-up, Jamie Greenbaum, Tonya Lockyer and Aislin MacMaster (in a dynamic performance) crawled, crouched, heaved and flung themselves about the space with calculated ferocity, periodically breaking into a playful jig or a brief moment of tenderness. Kin is as emotionally disquieting as it is visually stunning."
    Karen Campbell, The Boston Herald

    Contact Paula about workshops, commissioning new work or booking a performance.

    Click here to view the EARLY WORKS video.

    Until We Are Bone Until We Are Bone Tongue<br/>photo by Pam White Wild Moon Wild Moon

    FLESH (1991) from Paula Josa-Jones/Performance on Vimeo.




    Kin from Paula Josa-Jones/Performance on Vimeo.