Review: Ate9 Dance & Fleck a pithy pairing @ REDCAT
“It’s the second night of the third week of the 11th year of the New Original Works festival,” announced Mark Murphy, executive director of REDCAT performance space Friday night in a pre-show greeting of his audience. Surveying the full house of folk who track with emerging performance art, Murphy’s flickering smile seemed to convey, “But ...
Koehler Clips: Sondheim, Fosse, Nicolas Rey
For those of us who think that the decline of the American musical theater (putting aside “The Book of Mormon,” coming back soon to the Pantages) is a pretty sad spectacle, we have a nice fix of the real thing with “Six by Sondheim,” an ingeniously conceived look at Stephen Sondheim’s art directed by his ...
Koehler Clips: Iranian filmmaker featured @ REDCAT
Among its countless ethnic/national communities, Los Angeles has Irangeles, the sprawling Iranian diaspora that extends from Encino to south OC and amounting to the largest group of Iranians outside of Tehran. Yet the city curiously seldom sees visiting major Iranian filmmakers. REDCAT is helping counter this odd pattern Monday with the presence of the country’s ...
Koehler Clips: An Impossible Choice
Like a few of the world’s other major movie-going cities, Los Angeles often presents impossible choices for the exploring cinephile. And tonight, Sunday, provides a doozy. Where to go? To Westwood, to the Billy Wilder Theater, where UCLA Film & Television Archive continues its remarkable “A Century of Chinese Cinema” survey with two exceptionally rare ...
Koehler on Cinema: Clips
It may well be, as one Los Angeles cinephile said to me last week, “the year’s most important film series.” UCLA Film Archive’s “A Century of Chinese Cinema,” unlike the archive’s recent survey of contemporary Chinese cinema curated by former archive programmer Cheng-Sim Lim and REDCAT film series co-director Berenice Reynaud, takes a more historical ...
Kyle Abraham brings BODYTRAFFIC talent
Mar
1
2013
It can be sweaty, painstaking, unglamorous. The steps are stymieing when they won’t knit together. You’re half dancing, half hanging around. It’s always the same people; they never go away. It takes incessant tweaking to get it right. Welcome to the art of choreography, a labor-intensive affair that requires real-time interaction, patient collaboration. This honorable ...
Review: No chopped liver, but still great: GATZ @ REDCAT 2
When I was a kid, my yiddishe grandmother would pack us sandwiches for Saturday movie matinee (she called it “the show”). My cousins and I would line up at the box office of Pittsburgh’s Manor Theater, clutching in our little hands a few bucks and our greasy brown-paper bag lunches. The theater concession’s stellar offerings ...
Fitz featured in “Gatz”
Here stands the great American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in what strikes me as his penultimate Los Angeles portrait. Bleary-eyed but putting a good face on things — what we do so well in L.A. Noshing one night at Greenblatt’s Deli on Sunset Boulevard, I chatted with proprietor, the son of the original owner. He ...
Young lions of modern dance – Hofesh Shechter, Kyle Abraham – set to roar 2
Oct
14
2011
A very rich week in dance is upon us. Two strong young choreographic voices are contending across town, both are must viewing, indeed game changers, for the art form. Wednesday and Thursday nights, the Israeli-born, London-based, pants-on-fire Hofesh Shechter brings “Political Mother” to Royce Hall (huge thumbs up on that title, Hofesh). And the equally ...
Barak Marshall’s “Rooster” cock of the walk 3
Dec
18
2010
BREAKING NEWS, JAN 16, 2011: “Rooster” garners first prize in the Los Angeles “A.W.A.R.D.” show for Barak Marshall and BODYTRAFFIC. Read more in the Los Angeles Times Culture Monster blog. Meanwhile, here’s a prior review from December… * * * * * “Black Swan” got you down? Then check out Barak Marshall’s “ROOSTER” — a ...