REVIEW: Michelle Dorrance Dance @ The Wallis 1
The night before seeing Dorrance Dance at The Wallis in Beverly Hills I binge- watched Astaire and Rogers clips on YouTube. Such elegant technique! Two bodies moving as one in gauzy ballrooms. Dancing as if on air. In the 1930s and ‘40s, Fred and Ginger embodied love and luxury for a generation eager to escape ...
Hollywood harassment nothing new, says Barrie Chase 8
The brouhaha over movie producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades of inappropriate sexual aggression with actresses brought back sixty-year-old memories from Barrie Chase, one of the most superb dancers to work in film and television. Her story concerns Arthur Freed, the renowned MGM producer of an A-list of movie-musical titles, a revered high-quality player — oddly similar ...
Review: Karen Sherman’s “Soft Goods” @ CAP UCLA
As the Freud Playhouse lost its moorings and ran amok in the final harrowing minutes of choreographer Karen Sherman’s “Soft Goods,” presented Saturday night at UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, I’d be hard pressed to believe that the audience, too, did not become untethered. An out-of-control fog machine spewed smoke from stage to ...
Backstage building, courtesy of Karen Sherman @ CAP UCLA
Oct
2
2017
Los Angeles dance fans have been tickled by Matthew Bourne’s front/backstage machinations in “The Red Shoes,” now on at the Ahmanson Theatre. Bourne cleverly uses a freestanding, and rotating, proscenium arch to physically separate the backstage drama from the show-biz pizzazz of performance. It’s a timely moment, then, to seek a smaller-scale, perhaps quieter, variation ...
REVIEW: ‘Bobbi Jene,’ life-and-love in contemporary-dance lane
Bobbi Jene Smith, Or Schraiber in “Bobbi Jene” Tropes and customs of the world of contemporary dance are on view in the new dance-documentary, Bobbi Jene, soon to open in Los Angeles. Rarefied and bizarre rituals, notably a naked dancer, that would be the titular Bobbi Jene, masturbating against a sandbag before a roomful of ...
How George Martin found first dance job — in the Yellow Pages
Sep
25
2017
Debra Levine lectures on Jack Cole’s “The Gladiators” dancers: Rod Alexander, Jack Cole, George Martin A wonderful sliver of dance history sourced at New York Public Library for the Performing Arts concerns Jack Cole dancer George Martin. Said Martin, in an interview, apropos the start of his dance career: “My mother took me to see ...
Baryshnikov praises Pam Tanowitz
It’s whippped cream — dolloped onto Pam Tanowitz Dance receiving the Baryshnikov Art Center’s Cage Cunningham Award. It’s the high praise BAC Artistic Director Mikhail Baryshnikov gave in noting the ‘distinct intellectual journey’ of the choreographer’s work. “We have followed Pam’s work throughout the years, and are greatly impressed with her intelligence, determination, and the ...
Flamenco artist Jesus Carmona to punish new Ford floorboards Sept 8
A great flamenco show is an eyeful. But it’s also about sound—live music, thrilling singers, spontaneous shouts and claps, and scintillating footwork called zapateado. Making that zapateado clatter with further fury at the upcoming performance by Jesús Carmona will be the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre’s new floor. “We wanted a floor that would resonate for ...
Willdabeast to NYT: ‘I’m a beast no matter what’ 1
Aug
27
2017
[excerpted] “People would tell me, you don’t look the way dancers need to look. You’re not tall enough, you’re darker skinned. It’s gonna be hard for you to get eye-candy jobs or Disney jobs.” His response: to bring together “the misfits of the industry,” he said, “and be the example — that I’m a beast ...
Ethel Martin water-dances in Billy Rose’s ‘Aquacade’ 1
From an interview with Jack Cole dancers George and Ethel Martin available on sound recording at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Ethel Martin shares memories of working in impresario Billy Rose‘s famed Aquacade revue at the 1939 World’s Fair. Martin found a way to double her income by performing both as ...