...begins before you have even entered...
Varsity Review 1989
It is this jolting contrast between fascistic rigidity and frighteningly anarchic spontaneity that gives Hillar's work its danger and beauty, and makes it so unlike conventional theatre.
Canadian Theatre Review 1992
The distinction between performers and audience, theatre and life is turned inside out.
The Mirror 1989
DNA practices what might be called cubist theater, taking sealed-up narratives and slicing and dicing them into indigestible flows of experiential data that undermine unified and absolute interpretation. DNA productions are typically chaotic and challenging, subordinating narrative focus and individual feats of acting to multilayered sequences of meticulously orchestrated tableaux.
High Performance Summer 1990
Du theatre fou, fou, fou. Le DNA propose un theatre ideal, utopique qui agresse, derange ou enchante, c'est selon. On aime ou on n'aime pas le DNA Theatre, il n'y a pas de milieu.
La Presse 1989
Ce spectacle est acide. Et tant pis pour ceux qui n'apprecient pas cette violence sure et decapante.
Le Continuum 1987
It's a feast for the senses that thrives on spontaneity and yet is structured into a specific form. It's exhausting for the dozen or so performers, stimulating for the audience, and when the two factions intermingle, it's electric.
Sault Star 1986
The only unifying principle in this mad world of bizarre events was the audience - stranded as witnesses to something that cannot be understood, challenged to find a way to react to chaos.
Canadian Theatre Review 1987
I became acutely conscious that an actor has perched herself on a chair behind me and is now breathing in a peculiar manner. Is this a character's breath I hear, or simply that of the actor? Perversely, I begin to imagine that the director has caused the entire room to fall silent only so that I can listen to someone breathing.
Canadian Theatre Review 1992
What would the theatre season be without a show performed in a house kitchen, with women’s panties hanging overhead, an exposed stovetop gas flame and a character who throws corks at you?
Now Magazine 2009
Hillar Liitoja's theatrical practice is nothing if not vexingly enigmatic... Liitoja likes us to be aware of how theatre is a container in which we're at the mercy of another's imagination... Being in the performer's space is threatening enough; being turned into the spectacle is downright unnerving.
Toronto Star 2005
Liitoja and his DNA Theatre were once the bête noire of stage experimentation. Somewhere along the line, he found dance, and his company has since mounted a series of bizarre dance theatre performances, many of them site-specific, and each one radically different from the other... Whatever one thinks of his output, Liitoja is an eccentric visionary. He is an original, and of that there can be no doubt. As a director/choreographer, he never fails to excite the imagination.
The Globe and Mail 2007
Le résult est plutôt une orchestration théâtrale extrêment complexe. Loin du scénario une veritable choréographie du chaos dans une atmosphère apocalyptique. Cette cacophonie infernale peut paraitre subersive. Hillar Liitoja disloque complètement les méchanismes de compréhension auxquels nous avons été habitués. Il applique en quelque sorte la théorie d'Einstein. La sensation est écoeurante.
Voir 1987
...it doesn't leave you alone after you leave...
Theatrum 1987
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