REVIEW: BODYTRAFFIC’s Wallis residency opens strongly

Dance · Reviews
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BODYTRAFFIC performs (d)elusive minds by Fernando Hernando Magadan (l-r) Guzmán Rosado, Tina Finkelman Berkett. Photo by Don Lee. Some dance performances give us gorgeous bodies, abstract movement and music we can hum: an escape from politics, madness and murder. Others use dancers for polemics and not much else; these may be worthy, but hard to watch. On Friday, ...

‘Buy local’ defines 2019/20 dance season at The Wallis

Dance
A big gang of arts journalists crossed the thin line to mount the stage of the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts Tuesday evening to toast a special occasion whose time has come. In his annual upcoming-season announcement, The Wallis’s artistic director Paul Crewes, shown in photo with the Beverly Hills theater’s CEO Rachel ...

‘PillowNote’ for BODYTRAFFIC @ Jacob’s Pillow

Dance · Ideas & Opinion
Excerpt courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow: Of the companies vying for the attention of Los Angeles’s newly fervored dance audience, BODYTRAFFIC, making its second appearance at Jacob’s Pillow, naturally aspired to top prominence. Lately, however, co-artistic directors Lillian Barbeito and Tina Berkett have adjusted that goal. “When people thought of Los Angeles, we wanted to BODYTRAFFIC ...

Kyle Abraham’s “Kollide” in world premiere by BODYTRAFFIC

Dance
It’s not possible — without being extremely personal — to describe what took place when the handsome and effervescent local dance troupe BODYTRAFFIC took to Santa Monica’s Broad Stage last night. Because this happening company isn’t just a triumph for itself—of course, it’s that too—but for an entire community that has waited for lightening to ...

Kyle Abraham brings BODYTRAFFIC talent

Dance
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 ...

BODYTRAFFIC to share wares at Jacob’s Pillow

Dance
Some hugely happy news, we’ve learned that L.A.’s hard-dancing, home-grown repertory dance troupe, BODYTRAFFIC, now in its fifth year, will perform next summer at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. The Pillow, whose tony hilltop campus in the Berkshires houses two theaters, a summer dance program, picnicking grounds and a wonderful archives, has hosted a huge swathe ...

What the performing arts look like in Los Angeles

Dance · Music
A post-performance picture captures the youth and vigor of the performing arts in Los Angeles today. Review of the concert one post below, or click here. With Miguel Perez, Lillian Rose Barbeito, Ja-Young Jessie Kim, Merett Miller Shah, Melissa Bourkas, Hai Kai, Andrew Cowan, Andrew Wojtal and Tina Finkelman Berkett at The Walt Disney Concert ...

Review: BodyTraffic at the Gindi 1

Dance · Reviews
Did you feel the earthquake that rocked the top of the 405 Freeway near Mulholland Drive Thursday night? Oh, you missed it? It was the tremor of excitement when BodyTraffic, Los Angeles’s newest and best entry into the contemporary dance universe, shook the stage of the University of Judaism’s Gindi Auditorium. The ten-member troupe, co-directed ...

Traffic getting heavy near Mulholland Drive. BodyTraffic on board!

Dance
In flagrant disregard of its own name, BODYTRAFFIC, the Los Angeles contemporary dance company, is racing ahead. So we wrote in the Los Angeles Times about Southern California’s sleek repertory dance ensemble. Indeed our local dance troupe BODYTRAFFIC will transfer a slate of cool contemporary choreography across the country to the Joyce Theater — the ...