Lula & Erwin Washington honored by Dance/USA

Dance
Editor’s note: In a story written for the upcoming conference of Dance/USA in Los Angeles, artsmeme’s Debra Levine profiled a beloved couple of the local dance community, Lula and Erwin Washington, who will receive the Champion Award on 6 June 2018. An excerpt from Debra’s story here: What hath Lula and Erwin wrought? Consider a ...

Female choreographers to receive ‘guidance and feedback’ from ABT 11

Dance
It’s become a meme: “You can’t make this stuff up.” That was my reaction to American Ballet Theatre’s late-in-the-day scramble, yesterday, onto the #metoo bandwagon. The company’s bumbling response to being called out for nearly 30 years of institutional sexism resulting in the marginalization — if not exclusion — of women from the artistic and ...

State of the art: Childish Gambino & dancers, choreographer Sherrie Silver 2

Dance · Music
“This is America” — twisted, sideways, partying. Ominous and sour-sounding. Soulful but fearful — as choreographed by Rwanda-born, U.K.-reared Sherrie Silver.

Whatever happened to Robert Aldrich? FEUD’s pattern of distortion 2

Film
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Breaking news: On May 6, 2018, the California Supreme Court received a petition to review the California appeals court decision to dismiss Olivia de Havilland’s lawsuit against television network FX and Ryan Murphy which reversed her original legal win that she had grounds to pursue her fight against how she was depicted in FEUD. The ...

Dance-dwellers at the Villa Carlotta

Architecture & Design · Dance
When the call came from Hollywood in January 1941, the choreographer Jack Cole, leading his three-member troupe, repaired to Los Angeles tout de suite. So quickly did Cole dispatch his dancers Anna Austin and Florence Lessing to Calilfornia, that Austin wrote in her memoir, “We did not have time to take makeup off.” We had ...

Farber on Film: the strong cinematic women of TCM Fest 2018

Film
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In the year of #MeToo, it seems only appropriate that some of the most resonant films shown at the TCM Classic Film Festival had strong women front and center. Both onscreen and off, 100-year-old Marsha Hunt has long been an inspiring figure. Known for her principled stand against the Hollywood blacklist, which damaged her career, ...

Wade in the Waters: the iconoclastic filmmaker to spiel at the Luckman

Film · Ideas & Opinion
The dryest bon mots in town will cogitate in the twisted mind of John Waters and drop with abandon from the distinguished filmmaker/director/writer’s mouth June 2 at the Luckman Stage on the campus of Cal State Los Angeles. Waters’s short experimental films in the 1960s used his Baltimore-based pals as actors and gathered steam in ...

In our own backyard: photography by Rafael Cardenas

Visual arts
Rafael Cardenas, the Jalisco-born, Los Angeles-raised artist known for street photography, presents a selection of new works at the Vincent Price Art Museum in East Los Angeles. The works capture backyard scenes across the eastside of Los Angeles by Cardenas, who is widely recognized for his black and white photographs representing a cross section of ...