Performance Space Highlights of 21 years
November 2004, The Sydney Morning Herald - Angela Bennie
…dancer Tess de Quincey's surreal landscapes of the mind, written by her body across the building's carenous performing area... de Quincey's barely perceptible movements built to such intensity that the space felt charged with electricity and some undefinable immutability and emotion

Nerve 9
February 2002, The Age (Melbounre) - Vicki Fairfax
… Tess de Quincey is a formidable artist… her intense, many-layered, intricately worked creations where the body, decentred and edgey, negotiates the mutated, arcane landscape of contemporary culture… With Nerve 9 De Quincey and her collaborators have created an epitaph for our time.

August-September 2001, RealTime 44 - Eleanor Brickhill
…Stewart's shimmering sonic and visual poetry and De Quincey's enduringly watchable portraits of attenuated human frailty… has a depth and lucidity that is immensely readable and challenging… the flowering of a peculiarly acute register of human sensibility, the medium through which a person experiences the world.

June 2001, The Australian - Deborah Jones
… a piece of such exquisite refinement… de Quincey and her collaborators in vision, sound, light and text (this is a true multimedia work) were on another plane altogether… intensely gripping… this sombre, challenging piece.

May 2001, The Sydney Morning Herald - Jill Sykes
Engrossing kaleidoscope of dance, sight and sound... … an inspiringly integrated multi-art form presentation… an engrossing, ever-changing sequence of moods in dance, visuals and sound. … this spare yet richly layered presentation. …which makes this enigmatic way of seeing and hearing an exhilarating trigger to the imaginative senses

Butoh Product #2 - Nerve
June-July 1999, RealTime - Edward Scheer
...we have the bare material of language on display... a more powerful performance presence is hard to imagine and even without locomotive movment the pulses of the body's capacities for movement are in evidence.

Document
June 1997, Alice Springs News - Kieran Finane
This was a performance of exceptional potency.

September 1994, Kölner Stadtanzeiger (Cologne)
...working in opposition to conventional choreography and all traditions of bodily expression with emphasis, determination and also anger... to retrieve the directness of movement that usually fails at the barriers of stiffened dance grammar. Even more radical... she deconstructed evey banal, familiar gesture. The self evidence in her repose, rhythms of moving and even the eye contact were left frozen by de Quincey, almost like a cocoon.

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April 1994, The Australian - William Shoubridge
An hour of masterly drawn movement and image where the pen never leaves the page... She has a presence and hieratic solemnity to her dancing that gives it the weight of a sibylline utterance, yet the work has a cool Euclidean logic in its geometry and layout... a body acted upon by deep and mysterious forces and her commanding expression resonates with those forces. It's like dancing turned inside out, if you like, and it is rarely seen on an Australian stage.

Another Dust
May 1990, Art & Text - Sarah Miller
Rigorously anti-humanistic in conception, de Quincey presented an alien body, the body as phenomena. The performer moving in space apppears as a dynamic web of inseparable energy patterns. The act of performance, the experience, becomes primary. This chameleon body, perceived and rendered as a site of desire, displacement and fluctuation... The spectator too is required to relinquish his or her everyday mode of interpreting experience, for the performance through its rejection of representation and logical sequences in favour of the sensorial body and of a perceptual space, arouses and brings into view that which we commonly do not see.

Feb 1990, Sydney Morning Herald - Jill Sykes
Mysterious and dramatic, grotesque and beautiful, Tess de Quincey's latest solo has the power to draw her audience into another world. Its intensity is absolutely gripping, its interpretative depth a rich mine of possibilities... Another Dust is a theatrical experience which should not be missed.

Nov 1989, Information (Copenhagen) - Monna Dithmer
An 'inbetween' space arises, where personality, humanity and individuality lie and pulsate in an indefinite state...it is total deliverance which is danced. An uncompromising surrender which Tess de Quincey in a fascinating way manages to maintain throughtout the entire solo. A beautiful example of a Butoh dance which does not become an empty purely aesthetic style, but is a highly personal observation of Butoh's expression and form. After a dance experience like this we can only ask for 'another'.

Movement on the Edge
Oct 1988, Ballett-Journal Das Tanzarchiv (Cologne) - Kurt Peters
Everything was endless with a maximum of intensity and a minimum of movement. There cannot be less movement to tell such a complex tragedy without words. Tess de Quincey was so powerful that she needed neither the light changes not the wire of the set for her 'Movement on the Edge'.