Conrad Tao & Clayton-Hamilton to jointly wish “Rhapsody” a Happy Hundredth

Music
by 
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 ...

Martha Graham Dance Company, dancing through time 2

Dance · Music
ed. note: This story by dance critic Debra Levine, commissioned and originally published by the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts, is reprinted with permission. When Martha Graham placed a single bare foot—famously small, her feet had enviable high arches—on the stage of New York’s 48th Street Theater in her 1926 debut as ...

Lost Martha Graham solo finds contemporary context in world premiere @ The Soraya

Dance · Music
Martha Graham, ‘Immediate Tragedy’ 1937. Photo by Robert Fraser. Courtesy Martha Graham Resources, a division of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Inc A scholar’s cache of rediscovered materials—remnants of a 1937 Martha Graham solo fashioned in response to the Spanish Civil War—has spawned a digital collaboration between Martha Graham Dance Company and the ...

One man’s ‘Bliss’ … @ Fluxus Fest

Music
… 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. ...

The games people play, according to Martha Graham’s ‘Secular Games’

Dance · Reviews
Secular Games (1962) choreography by Martha Graham Saturday night’s across-the-board brilliance encompassing both classic and contemporary modern dance at the Younes & Soraya Center for the Performing Arts, aka The Soraya — an evening of nearly ecstatic, unwavering quality by the Martha Graham Dance Company — had Secular Games, dating from 1962, as a standout. ...

Pre-performance panel discussion with Martha Graham creatives led by arts·meme’s Debra Levine

Dance
· birthday wish from martha graham dance company Yes, arts·meme got a special tenth birthday card last year from the Martha Graham Dance Company. Many women in dance reserve a special place in their heart for Martha Graham. Typical for dancers of my generation, my first modern-dance class was in the Graham technique. (It was ...