One man’s ‘Bliss’ … @ Fluxus Fest
Apr
25
2019
… is this woman’s The Marriage of Figaro. More to the point, focus on the final few minutes of Mozart’s sublime operatic score. Take that rapture and loop it for twelve hours – a Fluxus-Festival endurance feat — and you have Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson‘s Mozart madness starting at noon, at REDCAT, on May 25. ...
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 ...
Meg Stuart: female brutalism tinged by vulnerability
Jan
23
2017
At left, a portrait of the expatriate choreographer Meg Stuart who is visiting Los Angeles this week. Her bravura solo, “Hunter” will be performed at REDCAT this weekend. Many choreographers in Los Angeles will find Meg fascinating and real. I am personally very attracted by her distinctive brand of female brutalism — mixing raw emotion ...
A new chapter for CalArts dance dean Stephan Koplowitz
Aug
30
2016
After a decade in the position, Stephan Koplowitz has stepped down as dean of dance at California Institute of the Arts, aka CalArts. As an internationally known artist, and a Herb Alpert Awardee, it comes as little surprise that after years devoted to dance education, Steve wishes to spend more time mining his own creativity. ...
Phantasmagoria on tap in ‘Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema’
A treasure trove of hand-colored cinematic footage restored in rare films illustrate the first-ever uses of applied color in movies. Accompanied by live music, superb digital transfers of restored work from the archives of EYE Film Institute Netherlands transport viewers to a moment in time when colored moving images truly opened a portal into otherworldly ...
Rick Prelinger’s visual anthropology @ REDCAT
Oct
13
2015
Rick Prelinger draws on his vast archive to offer a cultural history of greater Los Angeles in pictures. The archivist, writer, filmmaker and UC Santa Cruz professor combines excerpts from long-dated “ephemeral” sources — home movies, newsreels, educational, industrial and amateur films, even studio “process plates” — into a detailed socio-topographical study of L.A.’s bygone ...
Rock on, Timur, in “Collapse” at BAM
Sep
10
2015
Very jazzed to learn that our home-town band, Timur and the Dime Museum, will share its bodacious, electronic musical-offering to dear Mother Earth, COLLAPSE, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s venerable “Next Wave” Festival next week. COLLAPSE, an art-rock tour of the daily dump of ecological disasters, with songs composed by band member Daniel Corral, ...
Jazz cooking at the Bakery, all ’round town
While the Jazz Bakery’s next, new home is being prepared in Culver City, Ruth Price books her floating concert series in some of the best listening venues around town. One of them is the Moss Theatre on the campus of the Herb Alpert Educational Village in Santa Monica. A horseshoe-shaped stage with wrap-around seating, fine ...
Thom Andersen, thinking with images
Feb
16
2015
A foremost practitioner of the essay film returns with a new work inspired by the writings
of Gilles Deleuze on cinema. Thom Andersen’s The Thoughts That Once We Had (2014, 108 min.) is a richly layered journey through cinematic history, masterfully edited as it playfully moves across decades and genres, and suffused at every turn ...
Review: L-E-V’s “House” of dance invention @ REDCAT
Not since Dawn of the Dead did as stricken a posse of emaciated weirdos tromp before your eyes — all the better to experience, in real time, at REDCAT performance space. The stalwart black-box theater is rendered even darker by Avi Yona Bueno’s gorgeously murky lighting design for “House,” choreographer Sharon Eyal’s futuristic ballet for ...