It’s been six years since Jamie Nichols organized the first Celebrate Dance festival, an invitational showcase of Southland dance talent that rocks Glendale’s Alex Theatre for one evening each March. With Celebrate Dance, Nichols – former director of the Pasadena-based dance company Fast Feet – offers a leg up to deserving artists and maintains standards [...]
I imagine the artists who had the Hollywood Bowl stomping and shaking on Aug. 18 were booked well before April 20, when an explosion aboard BP’s Deepwater Horizon precipitated the unthinkable. But Wednesday’s lineup of New Orleans music legends — the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and the Neville Brothers — [...]
REDCAT’s annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival draws to a close tonight (Aug. 7), but the three live performances included in this week’s show raise more than enough questions to fuel another year of artistic investigation. And as Thursday’s show sold out long before show time, get your tickets NOW and read on after.
Alexandro Segade’s [...]
On July 22, City Ballet of Los Angeles performed the final installation of its three-week summer series, Concerto Project, against a magnificent backdrop. In front of a wall of windows in a cavernous loft space overlooking City National Plaza on South Flower Street, dancers sidled up next to office buildings gilded by the sun’s [...]
There have been many versions of The Sleeping Beauty since the original premiere at St. Petersburg’s Maryinsky Theatre in 1890, each with its own vision of how best to honor Marius Petipa’s legendary choreography, Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s masterful score and Ivan Vsevolozhsky’s groundbreaking direction. American Ballet Theatre has brought Beauty back in six different productions – [...]
The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2010 Hollywood Bowl Jazz series kicked off on July 7 with performances celebrating the glorious tangle of influences that produced and continue to develop jazz music worldwide. The star-studded, soul-stirring lineup included Cameroonian bassist and vocalist Richard Bona, New Orleans trumpeter Terence Blanchard in collaboration with LA’s own Lula Washington Dance [...]
A couple in urgent physical conversation traces and re-traces a horizontal path through an industrial environment of hard surfaces and harsh light. The camera cuts in close so that heads dive and bare limbs slice through our field of vision. Then, when they quiet, we rest intimately in the tangle of her hair and against [...]
When Lionel Popkin’s There Is an Elephant in This Dance begins, an elephant suit lies scattered across the stage space, and the headpiece sits in an upstage corner, trunk askew, looking at us askance from under drooping lids. Popkin, son of a Jewish father and South Asian mother, grew up surrounded by images of Ganesh [...]
On May 16, LA’s usually far-flung dance community gathered together at the hip RecCen Studio in Echo Park for the 19th Annual Lester Horton Awards – this year subtitled “A Celebration of Community.” Hosted by the Dance Resource Center, an organization that has served and promoted dance in the Greater Los Angeles area for more [...]
UCLA Live introduced New York’s Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet to Los Angeles Friday night in Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Orbo Novo (New World), and Saturday the company returned to Royce Hall in its final performance (for now) with works by Canadian Crystal Pite, Norway-based Jo Strømgren, and Dutch choreographer Didy Veldman. I caught Friday [...]
