Do the La Gelosia … with Catherine Turocy
May
29
2015
Our favorite Baroque dance expert is offering a rare class on early ballet pantomime and expression that is open to all levels of experience. Catherine Turocy will guide students through the “passions” inspired by descriptions of 18th century ballerina Marie Sallé. Turocy will teach her choreography based on the music of La Gelosia from Handel’s Terpsichore in ...
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker to enjoy Los Angeles showcase
May
12
2015
News from our Italian friends at the Dance section of the Biennale di Venezia forges an excellent fit with a major dance event just announced for the 2015-16 season at the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA in Los Angeles. The Biennale announced that choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker will be awarded the ...
Ravishing dance-film journey to Havana
“Dancing for My Havana,” an Italian/Cuban co-production written and directed by Claudio Del Punta, has garnered the Special Jury Prize of the Dance Camera West festival 2015. The film, a colorful wonderland set in Havana’s romantic urban ruins, tells a love story interpersed with sensational dance numbers that give a rare glimpse into unadulterated Cuban ...
Herb Alpert’s twenty-one years of generous giving to artists
Herb Alpert, center, with the 2015 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts winners, from left, Maria Hassabi, Taylor Mac, Herb Alpert, Sharon Lockhart and Julia Wolfe. Absent because detained in Cuba: Tania Brugeura. On May 1, The Herb Alpert Foundation and California Institute of the Arts awarded the 21st annual Herb Alpert Award in the ...
Cyd Charisse at the ballet barre, in full flush of Technicolor
In opening moments of director Henry Koster’s The Unfinished Dance (1947), the audience gets the distinct pleasure of peering in as ballerina Mlle Bouchet (Cyd Charisse) does her daily warm-up. The gorgeous burnt-yellow tutu Cyd wears is the vision of costume designer Helen Rose. The color-saturated image — the yellow costume, Cyd’s red-red lipstick against ...
Technicolor rapture of THE UNFINISHED DANCE
This hallucinogenic slice of celluloid captures Cyd Charisse, playing prima ballerina Mlle Bouchet, in director Henry Koster’s movie-tour of the world of ballet neurosis, THE UNFINISHED DANCE. Here Cyd performs a balletic “combré,” a deep back-bend, at the barre. The movie, made at MGM in 1947, starred child actor Margaret O’Brien. It’s a ballet soap ...
Stellar dance company keeps Martha Graham forever young
Apr
20
2015
Wow, Martha Graham. Your excellence, exactitude and relevance entered a new era as the vigorous and beautifully trained dancers of Martha Graham Dance Company simply shined in a well-selected repertory evening, Saturday, at Valley Performing Arts Center. Onto the generous and beautifully lit VPAC stage, before a notably rapt, sold-out audience, paraded the latest crop ...
Oh Samuel Lee Roberts, you beautiful Alvin Ailey dancer
Apr
16
2015
The pleasure of watching the splendid and just-gorgeous dancers of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre at the company’s opening night performance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion drove home how much time I have been spending looking at images of dancers on a computer. And how that is not the real deal. To get the full ...
The great Graham’s California roots
Apr
15
2015
In my “pre-talk” prior to Martha Graham Dance Company‘s performance at Valley Performing Arts Center this Saturday night, I make the case that the impact and duration of Graham’s career start-up in Los Angeles has gone woefully under reported. Here Graham poses with her first partner, Ted Shawn, in “Malaguena” (1921) — in a California ...
Dance Camera West to spool classic ballet flick, “The Unfinished Dance”
Everything is beautiful at the ballet. Except at the movies. In the movies, for some confounded reason, the world of pretty-in-pink turns blood red. It’s a parade of backstage drama awash in envy, rage, depression, jealousy, backstabbing, unkindness — and that’s just the light stuff. At worst, there are full-on murderous attacks, vengeful fits and ...