Dancer/activist/organizer Joanne DiVito honored with PDS Gypsy Robe 1
Watching her react from across the huge ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, the honor appeared to come as a total shock to Joanne DiVito. The Professional Dancer’s Society bequeathed to the diminutive-but powerhouse DiVito, a much loved and respected member of the Los Angeles dance community, its “Gypsy Robe” for 2018, an honor of ...
Politics? Paul Draper says it with his feet. 1
Would that certain people would zip their lip — and tell it like the great tap dancer Paul Draper does in this footage from 1948. Draper, in that year, was on the cusp of being blacklisted in the reign of terror foisted on thinkers, artists and other creatives by the House Unamerican Activities Committee. In ...
Wicked and proud: choreographer Liz Lerman in conversation
Choreographer, dancer, and writer Liz Lerman will present an interactive lecture this week concerning a project she calls, “Wicked Bodies.” Lerman is researching the visual portrayal of women’s bodies throughout history. The Wicked Bodies project provides a format in which Lerman interviews guests, gathering data “real-time,” adding to her perspectives and understanding of the images, issues, ...
You’re much too much, and just too ‘very, very,’ Frankie
In this holiday season, we show how Frankie does lyricist Harold Arlen SO RIGHT. You’re just too marvelous, too marvelous for words Like “glorious”, “glamorous” and that old standby “amorous”. It’s all too wonderful, I’ll never find the words That say enough, tell enough, I mean they just aren’t swell enough. You’re much too much, ...
Hollywood’s cross-genre master Michael Curtiz gets biography
Academy Award–winning director Michael Curtiz (1886–1962)—whose best-known films include Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945) and White Christmas (1954)—was in many ways the anti-auteur. During his 27-year tenure at Warner Bros., Curtiz directed swashbuckling adventures, westerns, musicals, war epics, romances, historical dramas, horror films, tearjerkers, melodramas, comedies, and film noir masterpieces. The ...
It concerns us all, says choreographer Miguel Gutierrez
Ed. note: arts·meme is delighted to reprint an artist’s statement from choreographer Miguel Gutierrez on the occasion of a commission for the French Ballet de Lorraine soon to have its premiere. Gutierrez, an artist who is alternately outrageous and deeply thoughtful, shares his ideas here: I was invited by Petter Jacobsson and Tom Caley to ...
Not afraid of Virginia Woolf: Portland’s NW Dance Project
The Portland-based NW Dance Project makes a rare appearance in Los Angeles in a program at the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center that includes Woolf Papers, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, concerns the inner life of a post-World War I woman of British high society. ...
Family redefined: Armistead Maupin @ WEHO Reads
Oct
3
2017
An upcoming evening at WEHO Reads has Armistead Maupin discussing and signing his latest book, Logical Family: A Memoir. [The acronym ‘WEHO’ signifies ‘West Hollywood,’ home to many distinguished writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived – and died – there.] Maupin, the author of the best-selling Tales of the City series, recounts his odyssey ...
Memo to L.B. from W.R. re: ‘hoodoo’ president
Excerpted from “Lion of Hollywood,” by the award-winning film historian Scott Eyman, whose new book, “Hank and Jim” concerning the lifelong friendship between Henry Fonda and James Stewart will be out in November 2017. In his 2005 biography of MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, Eyman captures a fascinating exchange between two prominent right-wingers of ...
Our review: TULIP FEVER from A to Z 1
arts·meme friend and avid movie fan Owen Simon contributes a boiled-down film review that tours his gamut of emotions, from A to Z, for TULIP FEVER recently released by the Weinstein Company. Tom Stoppard’s screenplay depicts a 17th-century painter in Amsterdam who falls in love with a married woman whose portrait he has been hired ...