The audience at St. Marks clapped and cheered for the frail white-haired beauty and the young dancers who had so beautifully performed the solos that once were hers. The wet eyes were not just due to sentiment for her age and grace and persistence in dance, but for the revelation of the dances themselves.

People who had barely heard of Eleanor King were amazed, impressed. So were those who knew her background as a Humphrey-Weidman dancer, her long teaching-performing-choreographing career in Seattle, Arkansas, Santa Fe, her Fulbright to study in Asia, and her fine book, Transformations.

Everything about the performance seemed right…and the transfigured performing that got to the heart of each dance, and the dances themselves, were as true of heart as any I’ve seen.

Northwest Spirit Dance (l945) In the beginning, Seidel, wearing black garments and headdress, sits and breathes deeply, her ribcage shuddering, her feet twitching for a long time—so long that you can feel the struggle in her body. The spirit that possesses her is a strong dancer—harsh, almost violent—driven by the beat of a drum and the extraordinary Kwakuitl and Tlingit chants sung by Jim Berenholz. At the end, she is back on her bench, and you can see plainly that Other whom she both sought and dreaded draining slowly from her body and her soul. - Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice.

King’s dances seem as fresh today as when they were first created because they distill their meaning in metaphor… In l945, she created Northwest Spirit Dance, a mesmerizing solo of possession reconstructed by Seidel….In Salutation: A Meditation on the East (l963) King reveals her genius as a choreographer of stillness. .. Like the dances of Eiko and Koma, Salutation takes us to the still point of T.S. Eliot’s turning world. - Lynn Garafola, Dance Magazine 

Programs such as the Eleanor King Retrospective serve as eloquent reminders of the riches we may lose if we let dances vanish. - New York Times, Jack Anderson

…Andrea Seidel, King’s protege, selected and prepared most of the works in the retrospective. The evening ended on a well-deserved triumphant note for King, 83, who came onstage to receive a standing ovation. - Albuquerque Journal