Hip-hop hors d’ouevres, courtesy of Dance Camera West festival 1

Dance · Film
We’re just about two weeks to blast-off for one of our favorite events of the annual calendar, the popular, fun and stimulating Dance Camera West film festival, an event that touches many in the dance community. The festival this year celebrates a biggie, its 15th anniversary, and a new association with the Center for the ...

Charles Lummis, Los Angeles city founder, sprung to life in dance & documentary

Architecture & Design · Dance · Film
Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre will bring its site-specific brand of immersive performance, this weekend, to the historic Southwest Museum building. The performance, “143 Days,” is part of a commission by the Autry Museum of the American West and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Dance company will present a modern retelling of the pioneering American ...

Royal Swedish Ballet’s stunning, unconventional ‘Juliet and Romeo’ soon @ Segerstrom

Dance
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With a history that stretches back to 1773, you’d expect the esteemed Royal Swedish Ballet to offer a “Romeo and Juliet” full of swordplay and courtly gowns.  But no — not when master choreographer Mats Ek is in charge. He reimagined the tragic love story in 2013 with the same urban, gritty edge that he’s ...

Review: Antiquity updated in SOLUNA Fest’s ‘Rules of the Game’

Architecture & Design · Dance · Fashion · Film · Music · Reviews · Visual arts
Vulnerable humans cower in the debris of a humongous classical bust crashed to earth. An unnatural occurrence … like an airplane felled. Symbols of ancient civilization  — either Greek, Roman, or a modern approximation of both — tumble down, explode into shards. Not to worry; it’s all fake. It’s video art. This stunning and impactful ...

In Dallas, for SOLUNA Festival, coming apart at the seams

Architecture & Design · Dance · Music
In  a world that seems to be fraying if not coming apart at the seams, the ultimate deconstruction, that of the human body — a startling central image at last night’s premiere of “Rules of the Game,” a collaboration by visual artist Daniel Arsham, choreographer Jonah Bokaer, set to an original score by Pharrell Williams. ...

Review: Memphis jookin phenom Lil Buck & pals wow @ Broad Stage

Dance · Music · Reviews
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Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade is only eight blocks from The Broad Stage, but it took Memphis jookin phenom Charles “Lil Buck” Riley thousands of miles and several years to get from one to the other.  Six years ago, he was busking for quarters on the Promenade, but when a video of him dancing to ...

Sad but beautiful: Highways remembers ‘Dancers We Lost’

Dance · Visual arts
“Dancers We Lost” is a comprehensive dance-history project honoring performers who died due to complications of HIV/AIDS. The Dancers We Lost exhibition is the visual component of a large history project, it’s all so sad, but forgetting these people seems even worse. The exhibit is now installed at the noble Highways Performance Space in Santa ...

Lilacs to beget roses — and dance — at New York Botanical Garden

Architecture & Design · Dance
Tony and Emmy award-winning choreographer George Faison poses in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden last weekend with Naomi Goldberg Haas, artistic director of Dances for a Variable Population. The duo is collaborating on The Phoenix Project, a citywide event that will feature a performance by legendary guest artists staged ...

We love Hollywood ballet

Dance · Film
‘Normal’ ballet is so boring: Petipa, Balanchine, Tudor, Robbins, Ratmansky.  Those guys never put girls in pointe shoes on pianos. We prefer fancy, Hollywood-style ballet, like this photo from KING OF JAZZ (1930) made at Universal Pictures and featuring dancing by Russell Markert dancers (Markert, who, not surprisingly, founded the Rockettes, is listed as the ...

Rudy Perez, no cheap imitation

Dance
A performance upcoming features Colburn Academy dance students in the restaging of a vintage work by dancer/choreographer Rudy Perez, Cheap Imitation. The choreography, dating from 1983, has been reconstructed by Tamsin Carlson. Thereafter, the Colburn Dance Council will award Mr. Perez in recognition of his influence on modern dance in Los Angeles. Karen Goodman will ...