Made in Los Angeles: dance-manufacturing by Raiford Rogers, Tony Testa
Los Angeles has long been an industrial hub; over this city’s relatively youthful history, we’ve been a maker of stuff: first oranges and lemons; then a film industry begun on a wooden platform under the noonday sun; next, aerospace and widget manufacturing to prosecute a world war and man’s first step on the moon; then ...
Of human desire: Adrian Danchig-Waring at Lake Tahoe Dance Festival
Aug
7
2023
Lake Tahoe Dance Festival, Tahoe City, July 27, 2023 Photo: Erin Baiano It is a danced solo for a great dancer of our time, Adrian Danchig-Waring. The muscular yet faultlessly precise twenty-year principal of New York City Ballet ascended the stage in the guise of a 19th century poet: handsome in grey trousers and a ...
REVIEW: Fascinating time-travel with Mark Morris Dance Group at the Joyce Theater 1
numerator, photo: christopher duggan Mark Morris Dance Group was formed in 1980. The Joyce Theater opened doors in 1983. Yet while it has presented dance companies eleven months of the year, the Joyce stage had never hosted a MMDG season until now. So Tuesday’s opening night felt momentous – even historic – as MMDG finally ...
Lake Tahoe Dance Festival: dances for kids with baby on board!
Jul
28
2023
Lake Tahoe Dance Festival Opening Night Gala, July 26, 2023. photo by erin baiano When Founder Christin Hanna and her co-director Constantine Baecher of the eleven-year-running Lake Tahoe Dance Festival, now on in Truckee and Tahoe City, California, call their event ‘family-oriented,’ the community responds positively. Chatting after her successful Gala opening night, Ms. Hanna ...
In Tahoe, for Dance Festival 1
Jul
26
2023
stephen hanna, photo: erin baiano “There will be bears in Tahoe,” Festival intern Summer Hatcher warned me — a dance writer who has never lived beyond a five-mile radius from a performing arts center. As we departed Reno Airport, she explained that I should wave arms at the creatures. Summer was navigating Interstate 80’s sweeping ...
Northward bound, for Lake Tahoe Dance Festival
Jul
21
2023
It’s a well-kept secret, except for ballet aficionados. One of the most beautiful and natural environments in our nation, Lake Tahoe, California, the massive freshwater lake in the Sierra Nevada straddling the border between California and Nevada, is home to an engaging dance festival that marked its tenth anniversary last year, and enters its eleventh, ...
New book links American teen culture of 50s/60s to local televised dance programs
Host and deejay Art Laboe, of The Art Laboe Show with Jerry Lee Lewis at the El Monte Legion Stadium in East Los Angeles, ca. 1958. Courtesy of the Art Laboe Archives. Ed. note: artsmeme is delighted to share with readers the first of three excerpts from an exciting new book by author Julie Malnig. ...
Virginia Johnson: an accomplished life in dance recognized by Bessie Award
Jul
18
2023
A highly respected, accomplished, and worthy woman of dance, Virginia Johnson, founding member and former artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem, will receive the 2023 Bessie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance, announced New York Dance and Performance Awards Executive Director Heather Robles, who labeled Johnson “a pioneering woman in the arts.” Born in ...
Dancing with deer & birds: Dutch National Ballet’s ‘Frida’ at The Music Center reviewed
The deep fascination with the art and wrenching personal mythology of the great Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907- 54) found no better evidence than the fashion worn by the women of Los Angeles at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion this weekend for “Frida,” the bio-ballet choreographed by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa for the Dutch National Ballet. Donning ...
Pronounce Olga Preobrajenska 1
Jul
10
2023
Seen above (it’s a capture of a video, but does not spool) is dear little Olga Preobrajenska. Small in stature, mighty in reputation as a second ballerina with the Russian Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg. After her retirement, she became a famed instructor-in-exile, in Paris. She is also looooong in last name. Unpronounceable — until ...