Hold onto your hats ~ here comes VPAC’s new season!
A new season at a performing arts center arrives as a list, perhaps just like any list. But if you pause to peruse the rich offerings on tap at Valley Performing Arts Center in the coming season, 2015-16, you’ll feel the fun. Arts energy that is fun, youthful, excellent and diverse will emanate from Cal ...
Stellar dance company keeps Martha Graham forever young
Apr
20
2015
Wow, Martha Graham. Your excellence, exactitude and relevance entered a new era as the vigorous and beautifully trained dancers of Martha Graham Dance Company simply shined in a well-selected repertory evening, Saturday, at Valley Performing Arts Center. Onto the generous and beautifully lit VPAC stage, before a notably rapt, sold-out audience, paraded the latest crop ...
The great Graham’s California roots
Apr
15
2015
In my “pre-talk” prior to Martha Graham Dance Company‘s performance at Valley Performing Arts Center this Saturday night, I make the case that the impact and duration of Graham’s career start-up in Los Angeles has gone woefully under reported. Here Graham poses with her first partner, Ted Shawn, in “Malaguena” (1921) — in a California ...
High-profile Los Angeles showcases for choreographer Andonis Foniadakis
Apr
6
2015
We’ve not yet experienced the ballets of Andonis Foniadakis, born in Crete and dance-educated in Athens. But on an upcoming April weekend we’ll get a very good opportunity. Two recent works by Foniadakis will be delivered by world-class dance companies, each performing at Los Angeles’s distinctively beautiful new theaters from April 16 – 18, 2015. ...
Martha Graham emblazoned by Barbara Morgan photo @ VPAC
Fascinating words that may have resonance today, excerpted from “Martha Graham, A Biography,” by Don McDonagh, page 148: “We must win back our audiences,” [Graham said, in an interview prior to the Company appearance at the Mansfield Theater in Letter to the World]. “We have alienated them through grimness of theme and a nontheatrical approach ...
Dhani Harrison honors his Beatle dad @ Valley Performing Arts Center 1
Sep
21
2014
It was beyond beautiful, a huge pleasant jolt, in the midst of a wonderful, sold-out “The Fab Faux” Beatles tribute performance last night at Valley Performing Arts Center, when guest artist, Dhani Harrison, pictured at left, took to the stage. The only offspring of ‘the quiet Beatle’ strummed his guitar and honored his father by ...
A doctor in the house: Doc Severinsen @ Valley Performing Arts Center 2
That Doc Severinsen is a natty dresser is well known. But when he hit the stage of the Valley Performing Arts Center Friday night clad in orange shirt, red pants and a blue, sequined paisley jacket, it took several moments for the rich visual effect to sink in. With unabated high energy, the 86-year-old trumpeter, ...
Catch it! David Parsons’ “Caught” @ Valley Performing Arts Center
Mar
20
2014
Roll with Parsons Dance Company, one night only, at the Valley Performing Arts Center, as the contemporary dance troupe — 13 movement frolickers, they’re nearly dance punsters translating tongue-tanglers into clever body licks — parades forth David Parsons’ uber-physical dance creations. It’s happening this Saturday night at the chic and lovely theater that sits at ...
The ultimate Murray Perahia recital
In any great concert hall on the planet, this singular program with pianist Murray Perahia would be astonishing. At the height of his powers and maturity, he is one of our greatest living pianists. Perahia will perform Thursday evening at the Valley Performing Arts Center at Cal State Northridge, described by architecture critic Michael Webb ...
How green is Thor’s Valley
Thor Steingraber, former vice president for programming for The Music Center in downtown Los Angeles, has been named the new executive director of the Valley Performing Arts Center at California State University, Northridge. CSUN’s Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Harry Hellenbrand heralded the occasion: “Thor is credited with the vision to blend classical ...