The drama of the concentrational universe and the intensity of pure dance that refuses to obey solely aesthetic canons come together in Pabbaja. Michele Abbondanza and Antonella Bertoni show us how creative urgency can sometimes rise above the limitations of genre and give shape to real desires, feelings and suffering.
Paolo Crespi, « Il Gazzettino » , July 1994

Michele and Antonella, the creative authors, choreographers and performers of Pabbaja use a table as a stage prop, an incisive element put to great effect with emotional involvement to tell the painful story of stolen affections and lives overwhelmed by violence…The show is very powerful, sometimes sending shivers up the spine, and uses extremely intense expressive forms capable of conveying emotions that take the breath away.
Emilio Guariglia, « Alto Adige » , July 1994

The dramatic stage presence and incisive gestures of both dancers point to the desolation of the soul. The vocabulary is limited, anti-rhetorical, made up of long shivers, starts, iterances and doppelgänger images. And the narrative result is all the more disquieting because of the male-female presence of two figures so similar in their long hair, clothing and style of movement, yet so different in form and muscular power. The nude scene where some old tables serve for the couple to play out their desperation is beautiful.
Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino, « Il Giorno » , August 1994

Pabbaja is beautiful, movingly effective in its power of expressive synthesis using body, movement and gestures at once stylised and more real…Magnificent expressive force of bodies onstage, she and he so similar, the concentration, the painful silence of memory and loss, the force of gesture, the attention paid to things…Pabbaja confronts onstage by evoking without saying, with highly expressive theatrical intensity and infinitely moving images…The applause at the end seemed endless, warm, intense, full of conviction and true emotion.
Valeria Ottolenghi, « La Gazzetta di Parma » , March 1995

But the most moving sequence was the extract from Pabbaja by Michele Abbondanza and Antonella Bertoni, an intensely evocative dance about the barbarities of war, the feeling of life slipping by…A skilful choreographic construction and uninterrupted, powerful narrative that spreads touching breaths of truth. To sum up: in building a creative identity it is perhaps in this direction that a particular Italian quality could be identified in the variegated universe of dance.

Giuseppe Distefano, « Città Nuova » , June 1995

Pabbaja leads back to the immobile stage, where time is a waterclock measuring the suffering of man on man. Michele and Antonella, who for the entire third act have not once looked in the direction of the audience and whose own gazes have never met choose now, at the end, to embrace and die like the two young people in a Serbian city who were recently buried together.

Aurora Marsotto, « Il Sole 24 Ore » , April 1996