With “Pina,” German cinema legend Wim Wenders joins the recent ranks, which include American documentarian Frederick Wiseman (“La Danse”), the Briton Mike Figgis (“The Co(te)lette Film”), and indie guy Darren Aronofsky (“Black Swan”), in crafting rapturous, high-tech paeans to the art form. Wenders’s current wonder is shot with 3-D technology and there’s a lot of excitement over the cinematographic skill employed.

On the surface, “Pina”’s vast and generous showcase of Bausch’s Tanztheater ensemble seems to serve dance well. Beyond beautifully photographed, it’s sumptuous and cannot be more visually engaging.

The best parts, the brilliant bits, of “Pina,” may emanate not from the choreographer but from the filmmaker. Wenders removes Bausch’s work from the theater, and places it in the startlingly tidy German countryside (everything in this film is immaculate). A dancer frolics in the grass, toying with her colorful chiffon skirt. A duet transpires on a stunning glass-walled outdoor platform. Back in the city, the man and woman twirl at street level, beneath an elevated commuter rail track. Also gripping are the sequences shot in the mills and factories of Wuppertal, the central German town where the dance company is based. A male dancer, flopped onto the platform of what looks like a steel mill, moves his limbs like a broken puppet. Industrial supply cars glide silently behind him. What a vision. There’s an extremely wry sequence — gee the whole thing is so severe you dare not laugh out loud — clowning in a tram car. This material is amazing to watch, memorable, transcendental. Bravo, Wim Wenders. [review continues below photo]

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Bausch is admittedly not my favorite dance maker. What on earth is she trying to say? Even if I got part of it, it would be acceptable. I see that she’s gathered a colorful tribe, and employs a theatrical, plastic visage to make it all human. But I don’t recognize the people. The look doesn’t help me — unkempt hair, loose breasts, grandma sack-style dresses, lingerie-slips, ball gowns worn by bohemians. The male contingent is even weirder, in retro suits with bare feet. The staring, hanging, clinging, clawing, dropping and, above all, the suffering – to what end? It’s strikes me as very sad. The old-tyme music distracts, excuse me but I don’t care to reminisce on Germany in the 1930s. I fail to meld as an audience member with this artist, perhaps my inadequacy.

The studio and theater scenes, delivered in bits and pieces, are grounded in Bausch’s signature work, the unbearably opaque “Cafe Muller,” which has not aged well. Dancers sliding down walls, overturning chairs, the purposeful ugliness feels irrelevant.

So what’s at the heart of this movie? Not a documentary, it provides no artistic context. The film assumes Pina Bausch matters – a lot. I was waiting to hear from the grizzled German dance critic, a chain-smoking “Sprockets” guy, who’s devoted a lot of time thinking deeply about Bausch’s art. But he’s not in the picture. Instead, the precious explanatory moments are allocated to sound bites by infatuated dancers, e.g., “Pina told me ‘be more crazy’ …” Touching because the grief-stricken dancers memorialize Bausch so soon after her death, nonetheless, these commentaries are not of real use to civilians.

Does “Pina” deepen our connection to a mystery-plagued art form? That’s what I care about. Dance needs fewer Martians and more Earthlings; less obfuscation, more clarity. We need humane, direct communication with audiences. At the screening I attended, the response was muted. I wondered how many new dance friends “Pina” had made.  

_{Photos: ©Neue Road Movies GmbH, photos by Donata Wenders. A Sundance Selects release. Apologies to the photographer.}

Like this? Read more:

• Prepare for “Pina”:  Watch Sprockets.

Suddenly, into the theater and up an aisle rushed an entourage. Burly body guards surrounded a familiar figure. It was the matriarch, Katherine Jackson, appearing only days after the sentencing in the murder trial of her fifth son, Michael. Her third son, Jermaine, 56, hastened by her side as the group of about eight filed into the theater’s only empty row. The house lights dimmed and the stage came alive.

Janet Jackson, 45, had held the show for her mother’s arrival. In a welter of mixed feelings for this beleaguered American show-biz family, the performance began.

Jackson, a hearty trouper, plunged in, delivering a nearly two-hour concert sans intermission. Warbling in her soft but steady voice that occasionally fluttered to the top of her range, she led a stageful of performers — seven dancers, a six-piece band and three back-up singers — through a tightly packaged evening of her hit songs primarily from the 1990s. Out they poured, one after the other, Pleasure Principle, Control, What Have You Done For Me Lately, Miss You Much, Nasty, Escapade, When I Think Of You, That’s The Way Love Goes, Scream, Rhythm Nation. The five-time Grammy award winner, literally dressed in battle gear, anchored herself on this impressive bedrock of pop music.

It was wonderful to see Jackson looking healthy and well after the haunting vision of her brother’s decline. In the intimate 1,127-seat McCallum we got a good glimpse of her. Her widespread Kohl-lined eyes dotting her sweet diamond face, she shook her headful of Shirley Temple curls (only, jet black), sometimes scrunching it with her hand. All of this bobbed prettily atop her fulsome figure. The Jackson family’s remaining scion carts the baggage of a myriad body looks — from anorectic to plump. While she was not an ounce overweight, on Thursday she arrived fully loaded. It was fun to watch — her padded hips, shapely butt, long haunches, and lovely feminine torso.

But would someone please take “control” and dress this beautiful woman for the stage? Jackson’s costumer presented her in tight grey jeans, a white jeans jacket and laced combat boots, which, despite expressing the earthy side of her character, looked dated. It was fine as a specialty look, but not over the long haul of the evening. Not one thread in it moved, for one problem.

Janet Jackson is not her brother. You notice this. Hey, only one genius per family. Both in voice and in movement, she lacks MJ’s crystalline brilliance, his quicksilver quirkiness. She’s more studied, earthy, solid. But as one audience member, Steven, 49, of Los Angeles, noted after the show, “It was genuine. She worked her butt off.”

“Phenomenal,” said his friend Audie, also in his forties, from Palm Springs. “For 45 years old — the energy, the effort. You can see she loves her fans.”

A lovely interlude had Jackson seated on a stool with a hand mike, crooning ballads, Come Back to Me and Let’s Wait Awhile, with its romantic urging for a couple to be patient. Here her voice shone through, breathy and vulnerable. She needs coaching on hand movements however. 

Christopher, 31, of Palm Desert said, “What a show. She had great energy. She got the crowd going.” He added, emphatically, “She’s sweet.”

“I loved how she showed respect to her family,” said Paul, 60. “She was gracious.”

Prior the performance, Carl, a Palm Springs city worker said, “She’s on my bucket list, you know when you get older there are those you want to see. I’ve followed her since the good times. And this is an excellent venue. I would not go [see her] in a huge stadium.”

Local residents were thrilled that Jackson chose to perform at a small venue in their community. “It’s huge,” said Earl, 41, of Palm Springs, attending in a group of 15 family members, “She sells out stadiums.”

Karina, 29, of Rancho Mirage said, “I thought it was amazing. It was a dream. I grew up watching her on “Good Times.” I loved her since I was nine. We’re so honored that she came here.”

Jackson said in a statement, “So many communities are facing cutbacks in the arts and this beautiful place continues to grow and offer programs to the people who live in the Coachella Valley. That speaks to my heart, especially because of their outreach to young people.”

Adding to the evening’s wonderful vibe, Jackson’s presence helped raise $1 million for the McCallum, a result, according to a spokesman, that the theater has not garnered since 2008.

Read this story in The Huffington Post.

_{Photo credit: Marc Glassman for McCallum Theatre}

Hey, we liked it anyway! Pictured below, you’ll find:

• your humble, hard-working arts·meme correspondents, Debra and Larry, enjoying the evening;
• groovy audience participation in the pageant — a pretty girl in the lobby, a derriere-challenged “Iris” cast member seeks her seat … um, in a manner of speaking.
• Hollywood Boulevard’s dearly departed denizens rising from the sidewalk to join in the fun.

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Our close-to-stage seats put us in the firing line of a barrage of smiling, well-rehearsed, incredibly handsome and beautifully dressed performers. Beyond their clever design, the costumes fit so well; memorable are the ladies’ aquamarine gowns, quel couleur, and the natty, sequined unitards that show up toward show’s end. Heck, some of the girls even have sequins in their lipstick. Everywhere you look, something witty to watch.

The cast includes an entire Chinese village of acrobats who bend, not like pretzels — because pretzels break. Instead, Danny Elfman’s bubbly, yet epic, musical score provides the strong backbone of “Iris.” The music, half recorded (live musicians roost in the Kodak boxes), is tinged with sweetness and I think it’s nice that he quotes from Leonard Bernstein. “Iris’s” pleasing tone seems to stem rather genuinely from concern for the audience; this shouldn’t be noteworthy, but it is, right down to the final mise-en-scene in which trapeze artists zoom around in the Kodak Theatre rafters (do shopping mall theaters have ‘em? rafters?). This thoughtful staging gives the peanut gallery a good look-see.

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Some sequences are messy. The comedy send-up on the Academy Awards, an easy target given that Cirque occupies the house that Oscar built, is an example. If “Iris” is truly meant to be about film history, then keep the humor steeped in film history, not cross dressing, viz., lose the juvenile fruit routine. Why not engage L.A. talent, like our film history funny man, Michael Schlesinger, as a consultant? Schlesinger could sort this out and lend local authenticity, which the show lacks.

Speaking of the audience pleasing, thanks for letting us schmooze, throw back a whiskey, and visit the toilette during the intermission, an old-fashioned theater convention that has lately gone missing. Bring back intermissions.

Bienvenue à Los Angeles, Cirque du Soleil.

The gifted duo, Jodi Melnick, a former Twyla Tharp dancer, and David Neumann, a dance-theater-comedy specialist, created the absorbing work on a commission from the Pillow, and it caps a shared evening of their individual choreography.

“July” is on view literally down wind from the Pillow’s Ted Shawn Theater where Trisha Brown, the high priestess of post-modern dance, celebrates the fortieth anniversary of her company. One cannot but note an implicit passing of the baton, a generational shift all the more meaningful for taking place at Ted Shawn’s former Berkshires farm, where so much American modern dance history has transpired.

Melnick has worked as an assistant director to Trisha Brown, creating and restaging two operas, Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’, and Scrainno’s ‘De Gelo a Gelo’.  And Brown’s husband, the video artist, Burt Barr, contributes the luminous set design of Melnick’s marvelous “Fanfare,” which opens the program.

“July” begs a description of its players, two very different dancers. Melnick vacillates in performance as subtly as light refracts through a prism; in one moment, the slender redhead projects a flinty, hard edge. Then, womanly heat arises from her long twisting torso. On third glance, she’s gone — a ghostly, fragmented figure remains. It’s fascinating watching Melnick, and while she moved in the shadows of “Fanfare”‘s electric-fan projections, I found myself wishing it would go on all night.

Melnick shares the evening with her former SUNY Purchase classmate and longtime platonic pal, the classically good-looking Neumann. In his first outing, “Tough the Tough,” Neumann is all distinct form and boyish clowning. Trundling around the stage loaded down with folding chairs, he takes a great pratfall, absurd and laugh-out-loud funny, mostly because it’s so predictable.

In “July,” he’s putty in Melnick’s hands; mostly, he melds with her idiosyncratic way of moving that has no discernible start or ending point. She cleaves to him, he molds around her, sees her, caresses her, often without touching her, merely by his presence.

In an extraordinary sequence, shown in the photo at right, Neumann, on his back, offers Melnick the flat of his flexed foot. She accepts this invitation, and balances on a perch that in the real world would be not too stable, but when the muscular Neumann is behind it, she’s secure. Balancing there, she crawls down his leg using her arms; he supports her, and the two rock gently, as over a wide gaping crevasse. He’s her foundation, she cradles in the shell of his receptive body. The simplicity, the originality, the giving of physical form to an ephemeral such as trust between a couple — it’s what dance does best.

Whether by intention or accident, “July” augurs a return to, or perhaps a renewed version, of chivalry and respect between a man and a woman in the art form. For dance, reflecting changes in society, has journeyed far, too far for my taste, toward a flattening of gender differences. (To be fair, this prevails more in the contemporary ballet world, in which we often see crude interactions that border on the physical abuse of women.)

In “July”‘s version of Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage,” these two handsome creatures — she with flaming red hair, he with hair coal black — project a vision of masculine strength coexisting with feminine mystery. Kudos to Jacob’s Pillow Artistic Director Ella Baff for her vision in pairing the two downtown dance makers, enabling “July” to come to pass in the Duke’s beautiful natural setting. I suspect that after seeing “July,” couples of any sexuality will go home and be nice to each other.

_{Photo credit: Cherylynn Tsushima for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival}

Even the three-day closure of the mighty 405 freeway proved ineffectual against the strong arm of ABT. A huge, ballet-besotted audience showed up anyway. Filing into the indoctrination chamber (aka the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, named for the capitalist roader), they were submerged in a tale about happy peasants living communally — on a collective farm. “Bright Stream” goes on to portray how a troupe of visiting dancers engages their agrarian comrades in that most subversive of Marxist tactics — state-funded art.

[above left, Carmageddon; below right, Asaf & Sulamif Messerer in The Bright Stream, 1935]

Two hours later, the dazed viewers exited the Chandler, marching in lock step and clutching, in raised fists, dance writer Joan Acocella’s New Yorker essay on Ratmansky (“the most sought-after man in ballet”).

“He is the new Balanchine. Ratmansky is the new Balanchine,” they intoned, transfixed. They then swapped their BMWs for tractors, Calvin Kleins for aprons, fascinators for babushkas, IPods for pitchforks.

In the glare of Los Angeles’s blinding sunlight, they pondered what they’d seen.

A new story ballet, well, kind of new. The restaging of a 1935 socialist realist ballet with a sad political history, a rare item, a ballet with blood on its hands, if not blood, then the ruined careers of three artists. Uncle Joe (Stalin), you see, didn’t fancy it. And you thought Alastair Macaulay was a terror! Here’s Acocella:

Shostakovich never wrote another ballet score; Fyodor Lopokov, the choreographer, lost his job; and Adrian Piotrovsky, the librettist, was sent to the Gulag, where he died.

This painful pageant our friends at ABT delivered, with little or no context, as a cheerful spectacle of peasants, pirouettes and pique turns. And our audience (we live in paradise), who can barely discern Stalin from Lady Gaga, or a collective farm from the Santa Monica Promenade, gobbled it up. The Soviet Union was all long ago and far away.

“The Bright Stream” must hold deep meaning for the Russians and for them it’s a noble reexamination. But niggler that I am for history, even the Russians restaging “Bright Stream” strikes me as complicated. I wish I had seen the Bolshoi dance the work in Orange County in 2005, because revisiting Stalin’s failed experiment in collectivism (millions died) seems like their business, and not ours. It is ABT’s picking up of this project that leaves me so ambivalent.

The dance market, weary of the past twenty years of European balletic abstraction, is clamoring for old-fashioned, readable, full-evening story ballets. No one, it seems, but Ratmansky, is up to the task. Lucky guy, he’s flavor of the month; there’s been a bidding war for his services across Lincoln Center; and ABT got him. New York critics have proclaimed him king, the heir to Balanchine’s throne, and it’s smooth sailing from there.

Acocella even states that the reason Ratmansky is a great choreographer is that he eschews the (weird) dance inventions of the past two decades; he’s reverted to glissade-assemblé… the nuts and bolts of the classical vocabulary. There are layers upon layers of cultural revisionism going on here!

I’m wondering what this Stalin-era relic, rendered toothless by Ratmansky, has to do with America, or American Ballet Theatre. Is it camp? “Real” Russian ballet? (I get the joke! I have a sense of humor!) ABT’s new Nutcracker? Most importantly, can it exist outside its history, an assumption implicit in ABT’s championing it?

I was seated Thursday night next to George Chakiris, the star of Robbins’ “West Side Story,” yes, based on Shakespeare, but brilliantly reconstituted in an American milieu. I felt a tinge of embarrassment watching “Bright Stream” next to him, like, why is ABT doing this? I keep musing that Balanchine came to the U.S. and made “Stars and Stripes” and “Western Symphony.” He choreographed to Gershwin and wore cowboy shirts. He worked, like a zealot, on Broadway and in Hollywood.

It’s startling how far afield ballet has strayed in this country. My beef is not with Ratmansky, although faced with his serviceable but not art-dappled choreography, I’m unconvinced. It’s with ABT.

_{Thank you Ismene Brown of TheArtsDesk for the great historic photo.}

The ballet was choreographed in 1988 by Alicia Alonso, after Petipa’s original dating from 1869.

It was a winsome and nostalgic tour in a ballet time capsule, a demonstration of how it used to be done, a display of clean and unfettered classical technique by the engaging, youthful company. The dancers, brown skinned and with few exceptions homogeneous in their look, burst through the conventions of Minkus’s war horse of a three-act ballet, eager to please. The ballet’s claptrap narrative about the old geezer, Don Q, with sidekick Sancho Panza, pursuing Dulcinea, the feminine ideal, faded into irrelevance. What remained was a showcase of the beautifully trained dancers’ technical prowess.

Remarkable was the purity of the port de bras, an art lost, indeed killed, in the U.S.: a clean, highly controlled curvilinear frame for the ladies’ pretty heads, and an ergonomic support for the men’s bountiful natural leaps powered by exceptional ballon, or “ballet bounce.”

The most alluring sequence, a gilded variation by six gold-costumed toreadors, trumpeted unabashed Cubanissimo. Red capes whipping downward by their sides, the men stepped archly onto high relevé attitude position. Qué machismo!

In tempi whose speedometer Conductor Giovanni Duarte cranked up and down (Minkus’s soporific score could take it), the Cubans performed some of their most technical feats with body-defying slowness, inserting hesitations in their balances, then teasing the audience with wicked grins. The breaking of the fourth wall is not very standard, but youth and vigor prevailed and this audience member succumbed.

Act two’s dream sequence saw the filing of the female brigade, and here the presence of the ballet’s 90-year old director Alonso was most evident. The ladies echoed the great former ballerina’s long-necked romantic line, unearthly balances, and soft, noiseless pointe work that you simply don’t see anymore. The muffled non-sound emanating from a stageful of 16 corps de ballet beauties was a glorious occurrence. I scribbled “cupcakes” in my notes.

The Don Q grand pas de deux, Act three’s huge fun, featured a somewhat unequal pairing of Anette Delgado (Kitri) and Dani Hernández (Don Basilo). She, more advanced than he, confidently inserted multiple spins into her barrage of fouettés and pulled it off; he powered ’round the stage on a pair of Grade-A legs with upper body not 100% connected. He’ll be fully cooked in three years, stay tuned.

Perhaps it’s because I just returned from a tour with Lula Washington Dance Theatre in China, bringing an utterly unknown variety of American dance to a communist country, (where we were met with impeccable manners), but I’m uncomfortable with the critical drubbing the Cubans are receiving in the U.S.  The Cubans should be held to a separate standard. We can learn from them. We need to embrace them. They deserve it considering the cockamamie punitive foreign policy toward their nation.

_{photos: courtesy ballet nacional de cuba, nancy reyes, jacques moatti}

Read more:

• Strong season of international dance coming to the Music Center
• Read this story on The Huffington Post.

There was no better place to be on earth  — not New York, not Paris, not London, nor Beijing.

All of the action tonight was at a Roman-style outdoor amphitheater one hour outside Zhengzhou, PRC. That’s the capitol city of Henan Province (pop: 94 million). There, at SIAS University, the 13 dancers of Lula Washington Dance Theatre kicked it in two majestic shows — the first to a house numbering 2,400 and the second, tonight, for approximately 3,000 Chinese college students and their families visiting on a graduation weekend.

The audience was chock-a-block; a dense wall of faces. Rows of them. You could witness the homogeneity of the Chinese nation. The hard-driving dance troupe more than delivered, earning the house’s rapt attention.

The Chinese, as audience, are tough customers. They chit chat, nonstop, through everything. So to command dead silence, as happened on night one when Ramon Thielen killed in his highly technical solo, “Healers,” and then, on night two, during an acrobatic pas de deux between Lynet Shigg and Micah Moch in “Love is …” set to great music by Sigur Ros –  well, that’s a tremendous litmus test for performers.

Backing the stellar troupe, a sensational jazz combo under the leadership of Marcus Miller, with Kamisi Washington’s boisterous bleetings on tenor sax, subtle bass work by Ardom Belton, and strong piano improvisations by Mahesh Balasooriya.

It’s a family affair with the Washingtons. Tamica Washington-Miller, second generation, is a high caliber dancer with a strong penchant for drama. A dance-world veteran, and film-and-theater-world aspirant, the beautiful Washington-Miller not only masters African and contemporary black vernacular dance, but has a rare gift of talking with her body, most effectively displayed in her mother’s masterwork, “We Wore the Mask.”

“Mask”‘s dance-drama relates to a deep, historic concept in Chinese culture — that of ‘having face’ and, importantly, not ‘losing face’– a driving normative in Chinese social behavior.

So when Washington-Miller springs on the stage donning a grotesque mask, a frisson runs through the audience. It hearkens not only to the masks of Chinese opera, but it speaks profoundly to a culture that lived bereft of material accoutrements, and survived by managing with the ‘face’ they were born to inhabit. Face is heavy in China. Bingo, Lula Washington, this piece scored a Chinese bull’s eye.

After Washington-Miller’s gripping solo, she’s joined by the company — the men, in black tees and blue jeans, the women, bare-legged, in scarf dresses; from there, the dance blasts off. Marcus Miller accompanies on drums, anticipating the dancers’ actions; a one-man orchestra of funky percussion impelling a cast of seven.

How many American dance companies offer live art happenings like this on stage? Way too few.

Washington’s troupe possesses spectacular physical and emotive powers. As a choreographer she encourages self-expression; and this particular group (she’s had many over the years) takes the entree.

Washington’s male line-up –  the astonishingly lithe and capable Michael Battle, who never disappoints; Dwayne Brown, long-limbed, limber, and handsome; Micah Moch, dancing so deeply he almost dances inside out, and Christopher Nolen who juxtaposes weightedness with unexpected fluidity — cannot match the great Alvin Ailey male corps per se. But they out shine Ailey guys with their transparent love of dance, funkiness and individuality. They’re not about perfection. They are about manliness, and male artistry. They form a quartet to be reckoned with.

Washington’s women constitute a group love-in. One prettier than the next, the queen bee of the swarm this evening was the technically proficient Haniyyah Tahirah, her beautiful ballet placement begetting a big-bird arabesque. Tahirah excels in the Washington perennial, “Angelitos Negros,” a solo study by Donald McKayle about fierce Latina pride that’s full of technical risk taking.

Then there is Lynette Shigg, beautifully trained with a ripped-for-action body ready to exceed every limit; she dances like she’s looking for trouble. Queala Clancy: if only gangly gazelles were reborn as elegant, effervescent performers. Then the firey April Wilkins, like Washington-Miller a solid, even great, dancer-actress. Spunky Mary Runkle, young, girlish, tantalized the Chinese audience. But blondes have more fun in China …

This pitiless crew had not only a dance critic eating out of their hand; five thousand Chinese also succumbed to their charms, responding to their enduring hard work. Lula Washington Dance Theater leaves behind this huge cluster of Zhengzhou admirers. One of them, highly excited, asked me in Mandarin, “Lu-la Huaxundun zai Meiguo hen you ming ma?” i.e., Is Lula Washington terribly famous in America?

Well, I answered, somewhat. But let’s just say “not enough.”

_{photo: courtesy Keith Lommel, United States Embassy in Beijing}