Dada Masilo does Swan Lake @ Sadler’s Wells
Jun
20
2014
A bare stage, the backdrop awash in pale blue light as a wedge of dancers in elaborate fluffy tutus process elegantly from the wings to a recording of Tchaikovsky’s overture. Their costumes’ snowy white makes striking contrast to the various browns of their complexions. The men are bare-chested; the women are not. A flute of white feathers ...
Frank Morgan tribute concert @ Los Angeles Film Festival
Film festivals (let’s put “film” in quotes, since virtually nothing on film is actually screened anymore) should be about more than moviegoing. I know regulars at the Berlin film festival who swear that their personal highlight is the annual sidebar, Kulinarisches Kino (Culinary Cinema), which thematically links a movie with a meal. Filmmakers who attend ...
Glorya Kaufman joins Bernardo for the dance at the gym
It was mambo-mania Saturday night at the elegant Dorothy Chandler Pavilion when Los Angeles dance “angel,” Glorya Kaufman, posed with pleasure with George Chakiris, the Academy Award-winning star of “West Side Story.” Chakiris engaged in newsy dance conversation prior to a screening of the movie-musical masterpiece before a very full house of big-screen movie fans. ...
Koehler on Cinema: Los Angeles Film Festival, day 4
There wasn’t much on day 3 of LAFF that we hadn’t already reported in previous postings — and, no, writer-director Sam Esmail’s frantically busy and wafer-thin two-hander “Comet” doesn’t count— but day 4 was a different matter. Sometimes at festivals, one’s daily viewing can accidentally form a running theme. Saturday’s theme was What It Is To ...
Koehler on Cinema: Los Angeles Film Festival day two
The gold standard in that odd sub-genre, the Funny Country Bumpkins Movie, remains Gyorgy Palfi’s beautiful and amusing “Hukkle,” set in a remote Hungarian village. Palfi’s fellow Hungarian, Agnes Sos, tries to one-up Palfi’s bumpkins in her little doc, “Stream of Love,” by showing—shock of shocks—that old folks really love sex. I don’t doubt that ...
Los Angeles Film Festival @ 20: the good, the bad, and the meh 3
A useful purpose of a film festival overview is to steer audiences away from the bad stuff and toward the good. Of the 69 new or recent features in the 20th edition of the Los Angeles Film Festival, I’ve seen 34. So what’s reported here isn’t a complete program preview. But it’s a pretty fair ...
Gilliam’s brilliant, bonkers Berlioz @ ENO
Bombastic imaginations, bonkers juxtapositions, no attention to rules of deportment, and energy without limit. It would seem that Hector Berlioz and Terry Gilliam are a match made.. well, somewhere .. but certainly for each other. Following the wild and wooly success of his Damnation of Faust in 2011, Gilliam has trained his most particular talents ...
Tuesday is Wendy-day
Jun
6
2014
It’s always nice to have a special visitor from New York, in this case our good friend, the longtime editor of “Dance” Magazine, Wendy Perron. Next Tuesday evening, Wendy will join forces with a stellar line up of dance thinkers and dance talkers: the great dancer/dance maker Simone Forti and choreographer/educator Victoria Marks. It all ...
Find openness & clarity through art @ Honor Fraser Gallery
Jun
4
2014
An intriguing and beautiful show that celebrates a cool-headed, fresh visual arts language dating back half a century opens this weekend at Honor Fraser Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. Openness and Clarity pays tribute to the legacy of ‘Color Field’ artists who paved the way for Minimalism, Conceptual, and Pop art. Assembling works rarely exhibited ...
“You’re no spring chicken,” Bette Davis told Gena Rowlands in 1979 5
May
31
2014
So incredible, Wednesday evening, to see the great Gena Rowlands in person, interviewed by film critic Steven Farber after a screening of her historic tour de force performance in “A Woman Under the Influence.” As part of a long conversation, Rowlands spoke with great warmth about her memories of Bette Davis, with whom she co-starred ...