You’re invited: Blue13’s Bollywood ‘shaadi’ 2

Architecture & Design · Dance
It’s immersive, it’s outdoors, and baby, it’s Bollywood-style. When did you get a better wedding invitation than that? Blue13 Dance Company‘s ‘Shaadi‘ (Hindi for ‘wedding) will be a happening thing at Heritage Square Museum, a cluster of preserved Victorian homes in the Montecito Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. If Blue13’s ebullient artistic director and choreographer ...

Velaslavasay Panorama, at 20, makes electric Chinese connection

Architecture & Design · Film
The Chinese connection involved here is not really diplomacy; it’s not an economic exchange; nor is it ‘high art.’ But in a way, it encompasses all of that. It’s about culture. And it’s a cultural stretch to step into the wonder-land Sara Velas has created over the past two decades on the grounds of a ...

Antiseptic dance antics for our era: Steve Koplowitz at The Wooden Floor

Architecture & Design · Dance · Film
The cool kids who attend dance class at The Wooden Floor, the renowned and respected Orange County-based program that enhances youth development through dance, are not among the bummed-out performers sidelined by COVID-19. Heck no! They traded in the dance studio’s wooden floor for an asphalt parking lot! Under the command of a veritable P.T. ...

‘Sittin’ In’ at golden-era jazz clubs 1

Architecture & Design · Music · Reviews
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bird & friendscourtesy of jeff gold These days, every self-respecting college and civic performing arts center has a subscription jazz series. It’s no surprise, then, that many people see jazz as concert music. But it wasn’t always so. 1930s and ‘40s jazz musicians mostly worked in ballrooms with dance bands, but they stretched out and ...

Dance world on fire, at Jacob’s Pillow

Architecture & Design · Dance
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Heart-rending sight, courtesy BerkshireEdge.com The dance world responded with shock and sorrow on Tuesday to the news that an early-morning fire had completely destroyed the Doris Duke Theater at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.  Located on a bucolic 220-acre campus in the Berkshire area of Massachusetts, the internationally-known Festival had added the more intimate Duke ...

Through the eyes of Milton Glaser 2

Architecture & Design · Visual arts
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If you lived in America in the last half of the 20th Century, you saw the country, in part, through the eyes of illustrator and graphic designer Milton Glaser (1929-2020). So prolific and widespread was his visual sense that, for a while, almost all good design looked like his. He co-founded Push Pin Studios, the ...

Memorial Day 2020: Los Angeles theaters we miss 1

Architecture & Design · Dance · Film · Music · Theater
coveted during covid quarantine – the egyptian theatrethis spectacular photo of the egyptian’s balcony by morgan glier for the ucla daily bruin It all feels surreal — but my essential problem during the theater shutdown of the Covid-19 pandemic is that for me, art happens at night. Rarely during the day, sometimes at matinees, and ...

From ‘Pike’s’ to ‘Hawaiian’: Mojave Desert motel dreams

Architecture & Design
Ed. note: Guest writer Jeff Burbank shares words & photos from an intriguing, if spooky, desert discovery. The ghost of Norman Bates would seem to be alive and well at a certain abandoned motel in forlorn Baker, California. This Mojave Desert hamlet still considers itself the Gateway to Death Valley, but, in reality, Baker serves ...

Thank you, Robert Evans, for ‘Serpico’ scene at Lewisohn Stadium

Architecture & Design · Dance
In this snippet from Serpico (1973), fellow cops Tony Roberts and Al Pacino haggle in the eerie ghost town of a grand structure where so much New York art and culture — famously, summer concerts by the New York Philharmonic — met an avid audience. It’s the 8,000-seat-capacity Lewisohn Stadium on the campus of City ...

Thank you, Cesar Pelli, for your Orange County beacon

Architecture & Design
In my many years of trawling the San Diego Freeway southward seeking ballet at the Segerstrom Center, a literal beacon of my destination-arrival has long been a happy sight: architect Cesar Pelli’s masterful Plaza Tower. The master architect passed away July 19, 2019. Located on Anton Blvd. south of South Coast Plaza it stands in ...