DANCE REVIEW: Twyla Tharp talks
Feb
26
2025
Dance critics like to use the word “language” in describing the identifiable steps, movement chains, and tonality associated with choreographers of stature. At sight, you know it is Balanchine, Taylor, or Cunningham. You know it’s Fosse or Cole. But that metaphor does not often move to the next level, viz., whether (or not) in drawing ...
Twyla Tharp, irrepressible, meets Beethoven, Philip Glass, for Jubilee Tour
Ed. note: This story by Susan Reiter, commissioned and published by the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts, is reprinted with permission. Twyla Tharp: The name is distinctive and memorable. So, too, are the accolades the choreographer has accumulated over decades in the creative artist’s lane. Now, at 83, the Tony/MacArthur/Primetime Emmy/Kennedy Center/Guggenheim ...
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 ...
Orpheus-themed event blends music, poetry, film @ The Edye
Black Orpheus (1959) dir Marcel Camus The tragic love of Orpheus for Eurydice has inspired poets, artists, and musicians—among them Rainer Maria Rilke, Christophe Willibald Gluck, and in our own time choreographer Mark Morris and composer Philip Glass, whose 1993 Orphee Suite was inspired by Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film. An interesting event exploring the Orpheus ...
From South Africa, Dada Masilo’s re-envisioned ‘Giselle’ @ The Wallis
She’s messed with Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, and Carmen. Now comes Giselle. ‘Messed with’ is perhaps a strong term, but South Africa’s Dada Masilo is among a small group of choreographers – notably Matthew Bourne, Akram Khan, Boris Eifman and Mats Ek – with the guts to turn a hallowed narrative ballet into something ...
L.A. Dance Project to dance in L.A.
Some are still in a huff about Benjamin Millepied’s decision, in 2014, to leave Los Angeles and L.A. Dance Project, the much-hyped dance collective he co-founded less than two years earlier. But how could he not accept the offer to be dance director of the Paris Opera Ballet, one of the world’s oldest and most ...
Review: Diavolo’s “L’Espace du Temps” @ VPAC
Calling Diavolo: Architecture in Motion a dance company is like calling a monster truck a nice vehicle. It’s big. It’s brash. It’s loud. Sometimes it’s brilliant. The LA-based company performed its three-part “L’Espace du Temps” at the Valley Performing Arts Center (VPAC) September 19 and 20. Presented in partnership with the Ford Signature Series, it ...
Diavolo meets New West Symphony at Valley Performing Arts Center 2
We live in strong anticipation of DIAVOLO‘s season-opening “L’Espace du Temps” performance at the beautiful, acoustics-rich Valley Performing Arts Center. The performance will enjoy live orchestral accompaniment by New West Symphony, under the direction of Christopher Rountree, of a trio of scores by great composers: Foreign Bodies (2007, Esa-Pekka Salonen); Fearful Symmetries (2010, John Adams); ...
Let ’em dance: Bobby Fuller Four recalled
The Hollywood Renaissance of the 1960s didn’t need the Bobby Fuller Four. That unique conflagration of bands, managers, impresarios, producers, studios, engineers, session players, record labels and executives, radio stations, deejays, and TV shows incubated the Byrds, Sonny & Cher, the Mamas and Papas, Love, the Mothers of Invention, Paul Revere & the Raiders, the ...
Philip Glass on Cocteau’s “La Belle et La Bete”
Our friends at the Center for the Art of Performance (CAP-UCLA) have shared with us an essay by Philip Glass concerning his musical reconfiguring of Jean Cocteau’s “La Belle et La Bete” (“Beauty and the Beast”) to be screened this Friday night, May 2, one night only, at Royce Hall. The film will have live ...