Boy, uninterrupted: Choreographer Alexei Ratmansky in new biography 3

Dance · Reviews
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alexei ratmansky, center, rehearses the sleeping beauty: from rosalie o’connor photo The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet, Marina Harss’s biography of one of the world’s most active choreographers, is just exactly that: a beautifully written, close examination of the many ways in which the 55-year-old artist’s work and life are intertwined. Moreover, her ...

SoUNDz’ of Savion, at The Soraya

Dance
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Ed. note: This story by Susan Reiter, commissioned and published by the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts, is reprinted with permission. Savion Glover has been in the spotlight on stage and screen since an impossibly young age. In his third appearance at The Soraya, on October 7, the one-of-a-kind tap virtuoso brings ...

artsmeme to glimpse CAP-UCLA ‘Nimoy’ the erstwhile Crest Theatre

Architecture & Design · Dance · Music · Theater
photo courtesy chris nichols for los angeles magazine Named in honor of artist, actor, director and philanthropist Leonard Nimoy, The Nimoy is a reimagining of Westwood’s historic Crest Theatre, acquired by UCLA in 2018 and since renovated into a flexible 300-seat off-campus performing arts space. The show artsmeme will attend features performances by Grammy Award-winning ...

Movin’ & groovin’: Black teen dance shows of ’50s, early ’60s

Dance
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Teenage dancers on the set of Teenage Frolics (Raleigh, NC), ca. 1960. Courtesy of Yvonne Lewis Holley. Ed. note: artsmeme is delighted to share the second of three excerpts from an marvelous new book by author Julie Malnig. Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock ‘n’ Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and 1960s (Oxford ...

To the Tetons with Lear: loving memories of Christopher McHale 8

Theater
It was April 2008, and a glorious time to be in the region of the Grand Teton mountains of Utah. I was there, of course, for the majestic scenery but also to hunker down, indoors, in a dark theater, watching my longtime friend Chris McHale (1954-2023) scale his own high peak playing the titular role ...

Opening the floodgates of early-cinema disaster movies at Laemmle Theatres

Film
Irving Cummings’ THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD (1926), a pioneering disaster and special effects movie, starring Janet Gaynor and George O’Brien, re-creates one of the greatest disasters in American history, when, in 1889, over 2,000 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, lost their lives. In her first major role, Gaynor plays a teenage girl smitten with dashing engineer O’Brien, ...

Home to world-class museums now address of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts

Visual arts
jack rutberg in gallery september 2023courtesy pasadena now ed. note: Longtime admirers of Jack Rutberg, among Los Angeles’s most esteemed gallerists, we’ve been following news of his new location, on Lake Avenue, one of Pasadena’s grand commercial boulevards. With permission from Pasadena Now, artsmeme is excerpting a story by Eddie Rivera, Editor of the Weekndr ...

A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham, in third foray to Long Beach’s Carpenter Center

Dance
a choreographer of our timekyle abraham, courtesy u.s.a. today That the MacArthur Genius Award-winning choreographer Kyle Abraham could bring his dance wares to any stage in Los Angeles — as he has in the past — is an understatement. We’ve seen him at UCLA; last year at The Soraya; and at The Wallis. This season, ...

A Martha Graham/Agnes de Mille meet-up in the 21st century 5

Dance
in photo kathleen tovar, center, victor barbee, john gardner, american ballet theatre Ed. note: This story by Debra Levine, commissioned and previously published by the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts, is reprinted with permission. During the Second World War, with American men losing their lives in the overseas fight against fascism, Agnes ...

A ‘Hungry Ghost,’ satiated, at Skylight Theatre

Reviews · Theater
It’s everyone’s nightmare … to have a very weird white man, a hermit who lives in the woods, pry apart your sliding-glass doors and invade your crib, your private space, your digs, your boite, your last-ditch barrier of bricks-and-mortar against … people like him. And yet, that’s exactly what happens in Hungry Ghost, a new ...