REVIEW: Paul Taylor repertory a miss in Music Center dance-season opener 2
Who signed off on the venerable Paul Taylor Dance Company’s repertory-mix shared with fans at the Los Angeles Music Center this weekend? What should have been a joyous Los Angeles reunion with one of the nation’s longest-lasting dance companies (it dates from 1954!) felt like modern-dance homework. This show, in its totality, did not connect. ...
Movie-viewing happiness @ The Montalbán
Apr
25
2023
When I like something, I like it. And, lately, I like the summer movie-viewing series high atop the venerable Ricardo Montalbán Theatre, aka The Montalbán, located dead center of Hollywood, on Vine Street just south of Hollywood Boulevard. The above image of director Quentin Tarantino’s single-card credit for his kick-butt KILL BILL, VOL II (2004), ...
Two new ‘now’ ballets in world premieres by Ballet BC at The Soraya
Apr
24
2023
Ed. note: This story by Debra Levine, commissioned and published by the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts, is reprinted with permission. It is a big, hopeful, nervous-making, celebratory event when a ballet has its world premiere. The preparation is immense, with many moving parts to orchestrate: choreography and rehearsals, of course, but ...
Baroque musicians/dancers to prance & Zoom thru time
The Julliard School’s primary period-instrument ensemble, Juilliard415, Robert Mealy, Director, has scheduled a time-traveling performance enhanced by students from Juilliard Dance and baroque dancers. That means that added to the frolicking among woodwinds and strings, there will be prancing, high-stepping, posing, bourréeing, sissoning, and throw in a contretemps. All of that is coming your way ...
Sam Francis at LACMA: a California original goes global 1
Though his last productive years were spent in a Santa Monica studio, art fanciers with a taste for the color-laden Sam Francis (1923-1994) paintings had to search out isolated canvases at a couple of local museum installations. With “Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing” (through July 16 at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of ...
Up on the roof: summer movies at The Montalbán
Apr
10
2023
It’s a fun and cool thing to do. It’s Rooftop Movies at The Montalbán where a summer screening series kicked off the other night with The Greatest Showman, the Hugh Jackman/Michelle Williams movie-musical we had never seen. We had a ball. You can have one too. It goes like this. Find your way to the vaunted ...
Lauren Lovette ‘Dreamachine’ for Paul Taylor Dance Company soon at Music Center
Apr
10
2023
lauren lovette, choreographerphoto: erin baiano One piece of the esteemed Paul Taylor Dance Company‘s three-work program at the Los Angeles Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion the final weekend of April has our special interest. It’s a world premiere, first of all. That’s a big deal — and an honor for Los Angeles. But it’s the ...
Go celestial! jazz & classical music series at Mt. Wilson Observatory
Apr
6
2023
Who knew, beyond being a gateway to the heavens, that Mt. Wilson Observatory also has fine acoustics! (I didn’t.) To the ears of cognoscenti, the 100-inch dome is a 20th century temple to science with acoustics akin to the great cathedrals of Europe. There, a live music performance-series has taken place over the last five ...
How to blow up a pipeline – and blow your mind
What end justifies the means? If the end is radical environmental change and the survival of our planet, can violence be justified? In actions against private property, what if life is lost? How To Blow Up a Pipeline, the new eco-political film from Neon, directed and co-written by Daniel Goldhaber (whose last film was the ...
A sculptor’s inner life: Michelle Williams in Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Showing Up’ 2
I was entranced by the generically titled, but otherwise awfully good example of ‘slow cinema,’ Showing Up, directed by down-to-earth filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. This movie, opening April 7, is made by a woman artist; it concerns a woman artist, who is played by Michelle Williams, one of the foremost actresses of our time, in her ...