To San Francisco for ‘Mrs. Robinson’ the ballet, and more
Coo coo ca choo, Mrs. Robinson! So go the whimsical lyrics of the buoyant-yet-melancholic Simon & Garfunkel song that burbles behind The Graduate, the seminal film 1967 film directed by Mike Nichols that introduced Dustin Hoffman to the world. Playing the 21-year-old recent college graduate, Benjamin Braddock, Hoffman can’t exactly decide his next step. That ...
Getting back to where we once belonged: Karole Armitage at New York Live Arts
Jan
24
2022
When I perused a press release of the program choreographer Karole Armitage and her performance troupe, Armitage Gone! Dance, intend to present at New York Live Arts in March, it stunned me. She’s calling the evening of dances “A Pandemic Notebook.” But no one seems to have informed the now 60-something dance adventuress (yes, the ...
Cover girl. The great Chita Rivera.
Chita Rivera, DANCE Magazine Nov 1957 West Side Story opened on Broadway in September 1957. By November, DANCE Magazine had a new cover girl.
To Cucamonga, with Joan Didion 2
Dec
26
2021
Ed. note: Writer Joan Didion’s recent death sparked a memory for an unexpected author on these pages. It is Kent Bulza, otherwise known as artsmeme’s tech and SEO specialist. Thank you, Kent! In my freshman literature class I was handed a standard-issue Borzoi College Reader filled with all sorts of names of authors I’d never ...
‘I can’t dance,’ signals Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball in ‘Being The Ricardos’ 2
It’s no spoiler to share that in one scene of BEING THE RICARDOS, a cultural cataclysm heading our way December 10 in theatres and on Amazon PRIME, Nicole Kidman, as Lucille Ball, lets drop that her sexy boyfriend Desi Arnaz (Javiar Bardem) is going to teach her how to rumba. The embarrassing display that follows ...
Los Angeles, California, home to two choreographer-goddesses
Macaela Taylor, Danielle Agami It’s exciting. For awhile there, things were looking bad. We seemed to be losing the female voice in the contemporary dance space, as men, holding the reins of most operating companies, naturally meted out sparse commissions and jobs to guy-pals. Female dance leaders, critics and scholars sounded the alarm. Foundations, universities, ...
Ida Rubinstein, diva/dancer/actress of fascination, in new Holder play
A new show opens this week in London: It’s a theatrical presentation about “dance’s forgotten diva.” Which … I always thought … was me! But in the reality-based universe, our friend, Christian Holder, has another dance diva in mind. Holder, the great former star principal dancer with The Joffrey Ballet and a Renaissance man, following ...
Broadbent & Mancio, a musical partnership by intuition & osmosis 2
One of the most sublime vocal albums of this, or any recent, year was released a few months ago. London-based singer and lyricist Georgia Mancio and pianist Alan Broadbent committed duets of nine of their own songs onto Quiet Is The Star (Roomspin). The collaboration is one of the all-too-rare instances where voice, text, piano ...
You’re invited: Blue13’s Bollywood ‘shaadi’ 2
It’s immersive, it’s outdoors, and baby, it’s Bollywood-style. When did you get a better wedding invitation than that? Blue13 Dance Company‘s ‘Shaadi‘ (Hindi for ‘wedding) will be a happening thing at Heritage Square Museum, a cluster of preserved Victorian homes in the Montecito Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. If Blue13’s ebullient artistic director and choreographer ...
Ticket to happiness: ‘Le Bonheur’ turns 55 at Laemmle Theatres
Aug
16
2021
cute nuclear family – what could go wrong? It’s a personal favorite and a beautiful film, if only for its score. But it is also a visual feast. Shot in the suburbs of Paris, Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur opens with an idyllic scene of a perfect little French “famille” tripping the light fantastic of a ...