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 ...
Free tix! Twyla Tharp, Sunday at The Soraya
Feb
18
2025
Yeppie, it’s Twyla. Twyla’s back and The Soraya‘s got her. First at the Segerstrom Center and then, this coming weekend at the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts, February 22 and 23, Tharp is hitting the stage with fourteen best-in-class dancers in a 60th anniversary of her career as a choreographer. Here’s what ...
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 ...
Portrait of an Artist – the many roles of Medhi Walerski
Nov
12
2024
ed. note: This story written in advance of a November 23 performance by Ballet BC in Los Angeles was commissioned and first published by The Soraya on November 8 2024. It is reprinted with permission. Soft-spoken but emphatic, Medhi Walerski, at 45, is a ballet prince with piercing eyes, a crown of clipped curls, and ...
Conrad Tao & Clayton-Hamilton to jointly wish “Rhapsody” a Happy Hundredth
Ed. note: This story by jazz writer, Kirk Silsbee, was commissioned by The Soraya in advance of Conrad Tao & The Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra: Rhapsody in Blue on Saturday March 16. It is re-published with permission. The February 12, 1924 premiere of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” was a musical earthquake. When the young prodigy ...
Notes from the peanut gallery: London Philharmonic Orchestra @ The Soraya
Oct
22
2024
view from on high This season, which marked the heralded London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO)‘s first American tour in ten years led by its Principal Conductor Edward Gardner, had as an artistic high point an October 10, concert in Northridge, California! Sandwiched into four California stops (Davis, Costa Mesa, Santa Barbara), the LPO graced our beautiful sound-worthy hall ...
Three ‘wows’ and ten years of arts leadership from Thor Steingraber 1
“Three wows” sold Thor Steingraber on The Soraya. Steingraber’s long interview process in the fall of 2013 and winter of 2014 to become top executive of Cal State Northridge’s newish theater culminated in a site visit. As he marks ten years as The Soraya’s executive and artistic director, he remembers this moment as his first ...
REVIEW: A well-heeded call for community: DIAVOLO’s ‘Existencia’
We all knew why we were there. We were there to remember and commemorate — most of us having lived through it. We were there to ruminate, and then, to thank our lucky stars. For, in the ashes of the January 17, 1994 Northridge Earthquake, a 6.7-magnitude tumbler that overturned the campus of Cal State ...
post sponsored by The Soraya
Jazz/pop superstars Herb Alpert, Lani Hall to open Soraya jazz festival 1
ed. note: This story by jazz writer, Kirk Silsbee, was commissioned by The Soraya in advance of “A Golden Anniversary,” in the upcoming Jazz at Naz Festival January 27. It is published with permission. Few trumpet voices in history generate the kind of instant recognition as that of Herb Alpert. His short, pungent phrasing and ...
Shaken but not deterred, Diavolo dancers to commemorate Northridge earthquake
Dec
5
2023
jacques heim, artistic director, diavolo dance Ed. note: This story by Debra Levine, commissioned the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts, is republished with permission. On January 17, 1994, slumberers across the city of Los Angeles were awakened by a heaving jolt. It was 4:31 a.m. (This writer was hurled from bed to ...