The games people play, according to Martha Graham’s ‘Secular Games’
Secular Games (1962) choreography by Martha Graham Saturday night’s across-the-board brilliance encompassing both classic and contemporary modern dance at the Younes & Soraya Center for the Performing Arts, aka The Soraya — an evening of nearly ecstatic, unwavering quality by the Martha Graham Dance Company — had Secular Games, dating from 1962, as a standout. ...
Charles White, at our city’s artistic center LACMA
Charles White in his Los Angeles studio, 1970 photo: Robert A. Nakamura The Pacific Standard Time art extravaganza that blanketed Southern California in 2011 brought much-needed, new focus to the art currents that circulated in post-World War II Los Angeles. Those surveys, as fine as they were (there were some glorious shows), implored further explorations. ...
REVIEW: Simmering with Ate9 dance company at The Wallis
“Let it simmer.” With those words, the music savant Michael Jackson directed his band in This Is It, a documentary capturing his final, unrealized rock concert. MJ’s instrux came to my mind while watching the dance splendor choreographer Danielle Agami unveiled at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts this weekend. The Israeli-born Los ...
Sending in the clowns for classical ballet renewal 2
James Whiteside (Harlequin), Thomas Forster (Pierrot)photo credit: Andrea Mohin / The New York Times The tears of a clown rained down all weekend at Segerstrom Center for the Arts. It was the West Coast premiere of American Ballet Theatre‘s triumphant reconstruction, Harlequinade —and it was a pip. The dashing Commedia del’arte clowns pictured above, diamond-suited Harlequin and ...
Millepied’s disjunctive ‘I fall…’ exposes choreographer’s weakness
L.A. Dance Project, disjunctive, disconnected, photo by l.a. dance project A harrowing drive across dark, slick, and unmarked Washington Boulevard in pelting rain went unrewarded by enduring Benjamin Millepied’s “I Fall, I Flow, I Melt,” a 75-minute, intermission-less dance performance by L.A. Dance Project performed in the round at the company’s newish headquarters named for ...
‘When I say freedom, you say jazz’: JazzAntiqua @ 25
Folk flooding toward the theater half an hour before showtime gave the first indication that something special was on tap at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center on Saturday night. In Los Angeles, traffic-frazzled late arrivals are the norm. The faithful flocked to a special, nearly familial, celebration: JazzAntiqua Dance & Music Ensemble‘s big 25th ...
Balanchine goes global in City Center festival
The elegant brochure and historical resonance of Balanchine: The City Center Years generated great promise as a highly anticipated event marking the 75th anniversary of midtown Manhattan’s richly dance-historic theater. The six-performance festival (Oct 31 – Nov 4, 2018), which showcased an array of landmark Balanchine works performed on the stage where nearly all had ...
REVIEW: Heidi Duckler Dance’s fully ‘Loaded’ dock-dance at the Ford
A distant, pulsing whir of ambient music accompanies the sight of a peculiar, tall figure as he rambles toward us. We spy him (or is it a she?) through the half-closed gate (or it a gate ‘half-open’?) at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre’s loading dock. This creature, dressed in unisex coveralls like a hip garbage ...
Review: Dogged drills by Djordjevich @ REDCAT’s NOW series
An interesting time, last weekend at REDCAT, watching “CORPS,” a work by post-post-minimalist choreographer Milka Djordjevich featured in the second week of the theater’s well established New Original Works (NOW) series. As a young woman in New York, I performed in the dance company of second-generation minimalist Grethe Holby, an alumnus of Laura Dean’s original ...
Review: ABT’s Misty·fying ‘La Bayadere’ disappoints 3
Let’s start at the end: During curtain calls at American Ballet Theatre’s “La Bayadère” Friday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, ballerina Isabella Boylston gave her bouquet to her partner Jeffrey Cirio with a deferential flourish. Then, in a strange, gender-bending moment, she and third lead Misty Copeland curtsied, and curtsied some more to Cirio, ...