He’s just Ken. But, Ryan Gosling and Mandy Moore, Jack Cole has a name too. 11
Jack Cole (1911-1974) creator of “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”was so bad-assed you’d think people would show respect. Instead, one of American-dance’s most original creators was stolen from, even in his lifetime–and he knew it. Nineteen million people watched, on Sunday night, when, at the 96th Oscar Award ceremony, actor Ryan Gosling, looking hot ...
Three ‘wows’ and ten years of arts leadership from Thor Steingraber 1
“Three wows” sold Thor Steingraber on The Soraya. Steingraber’s long interview process in the fall of 2013 and winter of 2014 to become top executive of Cal State Northridge’s newish theater culminated in a site visit. As he marks ten years as The Soraya’s executive and artistic director, he remembers this moment as his first ...
The many modes of Chita Rivera
Mar
1
2024
Let’s watch this great dancer/entertainer, Chita Rivera (1933-2024), do her thing in her 2005 show “The Dancer’s Life,” in which she pays homage to her choreographers, Jack Cole, Peter Gennaro, Bob Fosse, and Jerome Robbins. It is a brilliant montage impeccably performed. Rivera found this luminous path to continue to share her gifts well into ...
Pina Bausch, Matthew Bourne in dance takeover of Bunker Hill
ROMEO AND JULIET director/choreographer matthew bourne, photo credit: johan persson It warmed my dance critic’s heart to see swarms of Angelenos flocking onto the Plaza of the Los Angeles Music Center to enjoy two impressive and complex dance showcases, both running, separately, at the stalwart performing arts center’s active houses. The 2,000-seat Ahmanson Theater is ...
REVIEW: A well-heeded call for community: DIAVOLO’s ‘Existencia’
We all knew why we were there. We were there to remember and commemorate — most of us having lived through it. We were there to ruminate, and then, to thank our lucky stars. For, in the ashes of the January 17, 1994 Northridge Earthquake, a 6.7-magnitude tumbler that overturned the campus of Cal State ...
Dance of death and renewal by Pina Bausch at The Music Center
Jan
22
2024
How would you dance, if you knew you were going to die? This is the central question the late choreographer Pina Bausch (1940-2009) asked of her dancers in 1975 when she created her seminal work The Rite of Spring. The work examines an unyielding ritual in which the sacrifice of a “chosen one” changes the ...
Big music by Sánchez/Alexa for big ‘Existencia’ choreography at The Soraya
Ed. note: This story by Debra Levine was commissioned the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts. The spasms of explosive percussion that jump off the screen of Birdman, the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 2014, are the work of a brilliant and innovative musician: the Mexican-born drummer Antonio Sánchez. In the decade since that ...
Splendid early film choreography by Jack Cole for ‘Kismet’ (MGM, 1944) 2
This YouTube bundling of two lengthy harem numbers choreographed by Jack Cole for KISMET (MGM, 1944) displays the young choreographer’s mature grasp of his craft in staging, and in creating beautifull and unusual framing of dance for the eye of the camera. The first sequence has rare footage of The Kraft Sisters, in particular Beatrice ...
Glitches and snafus: arts-writing errata that drives us crazy
As the Internet has expanded opportunities for all kinds of people to be published (including riff-raff like artsmeme!) with bylines, so too has spread misinformation, glitches, and snafus, the kinds of mistakes that an editor used to safeguard from readers. I myself am in this situation; I self-publish without editorial oversight. I am always grateful ...