Darrell Jones and Angie Hauser / Photo by Steven Gunther

Trapped beneath a table and caught in harsh white light, Darrell Jones strains against the small space. With stops and starts and interruptions, he and dancing partner Angie Hauser have been recounting their experience of performing the Bebe Miller Company’s 2005 work, Landing/Place. Now Jones’ voice grows louder and his words flow faster as he recalls a choreographic idea they “never really got.” Miller conceived of it, they rehearsed it “100 times,” and we see it haunt and possess him now: “a small wild animal trying to crawl out of the space between.” More composed but fully charged, Hauser refuses to give up and asserts, “I can do that.” The tension erupts around, against and on top of the table in a pushing, thrusting struggle that is almost violent and almost erotic, but seems to leave them both more confused than satisfied.

In A History, which had its Los Angeles premiere at REDCAT on April 4, we see how the Bebe Miller Company’s history of collaboration drives potent performance in the present. Part of a larger enterprise to create an archive of the company’s work since 1985, A History focuses on the recent collaboration between Miller, Hauser, Jones and dramaturg Talvin Wilks and brings their creative process to the stage. Foregrounding Hauser and Jones’ experience — their memories, their questions, their desires, their bodies — the work gives profound honor to the Bebe Miller Company dancers and the roles they’ve played in this prolific team and reveals Miller’s tremendous respect and generosity toward her collaborators.

Jones dances first. Spindly limbs fling and shoot, pulling him back onto his heels, buckling his knees and sending him whirling through space with a force that unsettles us — until he stops, laughs and shrugs it off. Having met him, we can know Hauser better. Against his furious flood of movement and easy manner, she is direct, earnest and almost aggressively alert, pausing to observe things we can’t see and consider a way forward. We begin with clarity through contrast, but when the dancers revisit the works they’ve made together with Miller and Wilks — Verge (2001), Landing/Place (2005) and Necessary Beauty (2008) — their identities become complicated, layered and elusive.

They go back into splayed headstands and tripping, falling circles again and again, remembering and examining the past and performing it anew. Eyes squeezed shut, hands gripping headphones in concentration, they relay and interrupt their own experiences or each other’s. Miller and Wilks appear only once or twice in the film by Lily Skove that accompanies the dancers on stage, and while we sense Miller’s vision and shaping hand throughout, A History is the dancers’ world.

Skove’s camera follows Hauser and Jones’ hands as they slide, fold, gesture and roll along the tabletop, and the honesty of their expressivity is striking. But nearby, the dancers remind us of the obvious: with each other and with us, they are performing. When they tell an off-color joke, he assures us, “we’re acting.” And when she wonders aloud whether he’s testing her during a rehearsal, I’m reminded of a snippet of Verge — disturbing in its ambiguity — glimpsed earlier in the evening. Gripping her around the waist, Jones shakes her with such force that her arms flail above her head. He shouts, “Is this OK?,” and we hear Hauser’s strained reply: “It depends on your intention.” In A History, we see these dancers engaged in the treacherous, glorious, baffling work of performing themselves within the web of worlds they’ve created together.

An undertaking like this dance — one in which reflection is the action — runs the risk of becoming too internal, too private to engage an audience. But Hauser and Jones drive the work forward and pull us along by keeping each other in check: cutting off a monologue, sharing a laugh with the audience at the other’s expense, refusing to cooperate with one another’s physical and verbal demands. I’ve read that A History “is designed to invite audiences into what dance-making feels like,”* and I think of this toward the end when I feel a bit claustrophobic. They’re stuck in a studio together, and we’re stuck with them. But we’ve all chosen to be stuck here together, because it’s a privilege and a thrill and we want to see the magic happen.

— Anna Reed, Culture Spot LA

Frances Chiavernini and Morgan Lugo of L.A. Dance Project in ”Moving Parts” / Photo by Eric Politzer

This weekend, L.A.’s dance devotees gathered at Walt Disney Concert Hall to see the premiere of L.A. Dance Project. Directed by Benjamin Millepied – former New York City Ballet superstar and highly commissioned choreographer known for his work on the 2010 film Black Swan – LADP was born out of financial support from The Music Center, and the group debuted with great expectations. Promoted as a curatorial collective that will become L.A.’s long-awaited world-class dance maker, the group (all New Yorkers transplanted for this project) has some things to prove to the L.A. dance dedicated.

While commitment to and investment in Los Angeles can’t be proven in a weekend, the program of works by choreographic giants William Forsythe and Merce Cunningham, as well as LADP’s own ambitious world-premiere collaboration, suggests the synergy of this group can do powerful things here.

Created as a last love letter to his late wife, Forsythe’s Quintett (1993) is a gift, and LADP offers it with generosity. As the gravelly voice in Gavin Bryars’ recording begins its shaky chorus of “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet,” Nathan Makolandra takes up the theme in his body while the others watch, supporting him with their presence and attention. With a measured calm, he unfurls an arm and then crosses a leg – fingertips and toes pulling apart and twisting his torso in a gorgeous épaulement that engenders each next movement with sure inevitability.

Traveling toward the certain end together, we see this quintet develop into an exquisite community. At first, Julia Eichten’s persistent smiles and breathy releases seem cheerfully naïve, but as she endures extreme effort and hurled-grabbed-pushed relationship, we see constant, determined joy. With superhuman control, Charlie Hodges catches wild, stumbling falls and whirring turns in deliberate shifts and composed stops. But when Hodges faces Eichten in a rare moment of quiet, the scale is only human; he gently settles her rumpled dress and rests a steady hand on her shoulder.

When Frances Chiavernini and Morgan Lugo meet, I forget to look for anyone else. Together, in some clear but irreducible combination of pulls and pushes, they launch her impossible length into flying turns that liquefy and then splatter – her hair and legs splashing out and spraying into the blackness. Their encounters end with a breezy backwards jog, arms linked and eyes glancing at each other in sweet, easy intimacy, until things fall apart. Soon twitches in her legs grow into convulsions that collapse her knees, and his hand caresses her head quietly, helplessly.

After Quintett, Cunningham’s Winterbranch (1964) is a dark space and a clearing out. With minimal movement, the dancers’ personalities and physical styles draw my eye through the darkness: Hodges’ explosive declarations, Eichten’s luxurious port de bras and spritely jumps. To audience members at the 1960s performances, the cacophonous score and often-motionless dancers suggested death and destruction. But this weekend we laughed out loud at the scurrying men who collected a dancer from one spot and deposited her in another before shuffling away. I think Cunningham, who reveled in the serendipitous effects of time and place on the perceived meaning of a dance, would have approved, and laughed.

We know Forsythe and Cunningham are tough acts to follow, but we can’t help but carry our impressions of the LADP dancers from those works into Millepied’s, and feel the contrast. Moving Parts is collaboration on a grand scale. At Disney Hall’s mighty organ, illuminated above the stage space, composer Nico Muhly sets a driving pace, while clarinetist Phil O’Connor and violinist Lisa Liu color the ambitious pulse with bright, hopeful tones. Below, Christopher Wool’s giant triptych – panels painted with densely layered numbers and letters and script – advances toward us, pulling us into a busy urban world. H HHodges’ sweeping gestures and cheerfully buoyant jumps make this city feel spacious, but then the panels box him in, shift and split – fracturing and destabilizing the space.

The regular, pulsing drive of Muhly’s score suggests a relentless, mechanical pace, but because the dancing mostly plods along with it, movement-for-note, the urgency fades and I find myself yearning for either more or less. It’s a relief and a thrill when the trio of women picks up Amanda Wells’ solo, amplifying her slicing turns into a spinning center of gravity.

Most compelling are moments when we see the dancers as the individual people we’ve come to know: Hodges’ oh-so-precise feet picking through a solo with pizzicato violin, a hippy conversation between Hodges and Wells, a torrent of tumbling gestures washing through Eichten’s body and sweeping her behind a panel. These bright spots are brilliant. But between them, without pulling at the music, the movement loses the humanity we’ve savored thus far, and the collaboration doesn’t seem fully realized.

—Anna Reed, Culture Spot LA

Regina Klenjoski Dance Company / Photo by Rose Eichenbaum

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 of excellence that make the show a tremendous opportunity for audiences. This year’s celebration, packed with nine premieres and LA debuts by eight different companies, comes to the Alex this Saturday, March 12, at 8 p.m.

Nichols brings two exciting out-of-town additions to the lineup of LA-based artists in Celebrate Dance 2011: San Diego’s Malashock Dance and Brooklyn’s Creative Outlet Dance Theatre. Director John Malashock, former Twyla Tharp dancer and one of the LA Times’ “2011 Faces to Watch,” has been making highly physical, emotionally charged work with his company since 1988 and recently garnered two Emmy Awards for his dance films. Called “a master of modern duets” by The San Diego Union-Tribune, Malashock offers a duet of his own and one by company member and former dancer with LA’s Lewitzky Dance Company Michael Mizerany to Celebrate Dance audiences.

Creative Outlet Dance Theatre, under the direction of Jamel Gaines, will close the show with Gaines’ “Prize.” Danced to excerpts of speeches by President Obama, this LA premiere tackles some of the weightiest issues of the moment: identity, race, political dissonance, war, and peace. To these troubled waters Gaines is sure to bring his signature electrifying vitality – a quality So You Think You Can Dance fans will recall from his group work that aired on the show this past season.

The out-of-town guests will share the stage with some of LA’s finest: BARE Dance Company, Deborah Rosen and Dancers, Monat Dance, Regina Klenjoski Dance Company, Terri Best Dance, and Visions Dance Theatre. Klenjoski, who organizes the successful SOLA dance festival in Torrance each year and has been a staple of the LA dance scene for over a decade, opens the show with an ensemble piece that boasts an original sound score by David Karagianis and addresses another relevant issue: how technology affects our ability to connect.

With so much talent assembled for a single evening, Nichols maximizes the impact of Celebrate Dance for artists and audiences alike by bringing a new generation of dance viewers to the theatre. Grants from the Flourish Foundation have enabled her to give away hundreds of Celebrate Dance tickets to LA Unified students over the years, and she’s made the show accessible to families by offering a $12 children’s ticket. This year, hoping to set a new precedent of affordability in the LA arts community, Nichols has lowered the children’s price to $10.

The chance to see these eight companies for a single ticket (adult price only $15-$35) should not be missed. For a glimpse of what’s in store, check out the Celebrate Dance 2011 trailer. And as the show has sold out for three years running, buy those tickets now.

Trey McIntyre Project / photo courtesy of LA Phil

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 — paid tribute to a city that’s taken blow upon blow. And lending awe-inspiring physical form to a history of grief, endurance and vibrant spirit, dancers from the Trey McIntyre Project shared the stage with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in their electrifying 2008 collaboration, Ma Maison.

“If you hear that beat …” In raspy barks that sound like the blasts from his trumpet, Efrem Towns of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band calls, “Get up outta your seat,” and we gladly obey. The DDBB plays the music of a fading New Orleans institution: brass bands that perform dirges for funerals, and swinging dance tunes once the somber processions pass by. Here, rattling ragtime syncopations, martial marching band rat-a-tats, and racing, trilling, squealing horns keep us clapping and chanting “My feet … can’t … fail me now” along with “ET,” and we see mostly the mirthful side of the tradition. But in the bright choruses — “No matter what you heard, everythin’s alright and we gonna be alright” — throbs a mix of pain and fierce pride, hopeful mourning within the merriment.

After intermission, lights come up on the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and picnickers around me sit up and take notice. In black and white formal wear, arranged in neat, seated formation, with band name printed on drum and tuba, they play classic New Orleans jazz in old school style — standing in unison when tinny banjo and grunting trombone rev to a climax, and gesturing theatrically to show us how “everybody lookin’” at the “Short Dress Gal” in their song. The slightly stiff, choreographed feel is such a deliberate and welcome departure from today’s performance conventions that I find myself smiling through the set.

A high steppin’, jelly-legged, rag-tag bunch of skeletons joins the suits on stage for Ma Maison, and together, with Sister Gertrude Morgan via recording, they generate an otherworldly energy. A skeleton in a jaunty green vest tosses white hands and feet out with the percussive hits of Carl LeBlanc’s strong banjo strumming in “Heebie Jeebies,” until a limb locks straight and he hobbles peg-legged in silly circles. The revelry feels mostly like joyful hilarity, but when one bag o’ bones keeps collapsing into his partner we smell death and feel frantic fear creep into the group’s sideways scurries and crazed kicks.

Morbid references lurk in all corners of this house — in the spidery shadows cast by spindly skeleton arms, in the bowed heads and softly prancing feet that sometimes turn the perpetual Mardi Gras parade into a solemn procession, and in the quick group exits with one merrymaker held stiff, aloft. But this crew parties in the face of death, hitching up legs, pumping arms, and leapfrogging over one another while the band sings, “Life is complicated … Oh, life is overrated.”

McIntyre works masterfully with the music, and he builds a movement vocabulary that draws on his dancers’ balletic virtuosity while transforming them into shaking, shimmying Lindy Hoppers who get down more convincingly than any ballet company I’ve seen.

Neville Brothers / photo courtesy of LA Phil

The skeletons take their party into the wings, but New Orleans’ first family of R&B, the Neville Brothers, keeps our celebration of the Big Easy going strong. Cyril slaps the drums and throws out fiery vocals in choppy bursts. Art’s fingers find funky up accents at the organ, while he sings, smirking, “Me oh my oh … gonna catch all the fish on the bayou.” Charles releases great swelling waves from the sax, then pulls back with a gentle turn to reveal Aaron’s voice — clear and shivering with soul. With eyes squeezed shut and shoulders hunched, he sings, “Long time comin’, change gonna come,” and I hear a wail rising under the soft, sweet sound.

Catch the conclusion of Jazz at the Bowl 2010 on Sept. 1, when Herbie Hancock celebrates his 70th birthday with help from a host of special musical guests.

Miwa Matreyek’s "Myth and Infrastructure" / Photo by Scott Groller

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 Replicant VS Separatist, a play framed as a budget movie shoot complete with directorial “cuts” and actors who switch between roles, couldn’t be more timely, premiering hot on the heels of the decision to overturn California’s ban on gay marriage. The movie inside the play depicts a dystopian LA where marriage has become a state-mandated instrument of government control over gay relationships. The clones who comply: Replicants (Reps). The boy-band renegades who love outside the law and fight to establish a state beyond the new governator’s reach: Separatists (Seps).

Segade’s choice to build a story full of wonderfully classic sci-fi illusions – like hovercars and teleportation – within a deliberately anti-illusionistic frame at first heightens the humor by playing up the falseness. But then his droning directorial comments lose their deadpan comedy and, in combination with ever-shortening, increasingly perfunctory scenes, deaden the energy. Maybe we need these breaks to keep us from getting so swept up in the onstage antics that we forget to consider their broader implications. But at the end, I wonder if we’ve been distanced so successfully that instead of dispassionately considering the issues raised, we move on too easily to the next new work.

Hana van der Kolk mouths something from behind a microphone. She releases a vowel sound, then others in steady rhythm, and when she adds consonants the chorus from the 1987 classic “Lost in Emotion” gradually emerges in a robust chant. Watching Once More, Again, One, we whisper and chuckle softly when we get it, and sharing the joke connects us to her and each other through the darkness. Later on, van der Kolk transfers her weight side to side with an easy bounce, punctuating some drops with a spoken “yes.” The bounces morph to jazzy jogs, then hunched boxing footwork, then ecstatic Richard Simmons-style reaches, and she says “yes” to each with complete investment and unequivocal assent.

I struggle to engage through some of the work’s slower progressions and stillnesses, but the spaces make Once More feel like a relaxed conversation and invite us to take part. Van der Kolk makes a formal and completely unthreatening invitation when she holds up a sign that reads “I need a volunteer.” Although the physical tasks they complete don’t seem quite worth the trouble, the exchanges we witness while she whispers her plans to each volunteer are thrillingly real and beautifully human. They smile shyly, giggle and shake out shoulders nervously, register polite unwillingness with side-to-side tilts of the head, and as we imagine ourselves doing these things we feel welcomed by van der Kolk too.

Oh, if only all evenings could end as magically as this show does. A woman’s rounded silhouette wanders through an ever-blossoming, ever-changing world in Miwa Matreyek’s Myth and Infrastructure. Interacting with her animations from behind a screen, Matreyek casts a shadow that steps lightly and fingers tenderly, exploring blinking cityscapes like a gentle King Kong, or forming an island paradise with her softly sloping back.

The images that result suggest creation stories, as lands materialize with a breath or a tap, or apocalypses, as tiny planes crash down around her head and buildings collapse at her feet. Her powers to create and transform intrigue as she encounters other beings with agency – a bear that lumbers onto her back, fish that rush and swirl about her, a tiny person who climbs into her mouth and down her throat. Toward the end I find myself hoping for more variation in Matreyek’s physical interactions with these creatures and their world, but the work is mesmerizing throughout and exciting in the rich possibilities it suggests for future incarnations.

Segade, van der Kolk and Matreyek present these works in the final performance of the NOW Festival tonight, Aug. 7, at 8:30 p.m.

City Ballet dancers Jose Reyes and Genevieve Zander / Photo by Julie Hopkins

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 slanting rays and slid past the smooth façade of the public library – washed a warm golden beige in the fading daylight. It was a glorious setting for dance, and a fitting one for a company so devoted and connected to its city.

Founded by former American Ballet Theatre dancer and Los Angeles native Robyn Gardenhire as a school in 2000 and then as a professional company in 2003, City Ballet of Los Angeles has worked since its inception to become a dance institution of and for Los Angeles: offering training at low or no cost to children from the economically depressed Pico Union District, introducing ballet to thousands of elementary school students throughout LA, and developing a company that reflects the diversity of its city and brings ballet to new audiences.

Envisioned as a platform for the dancers’ choreography in the rich architectural environment of downtown LA, the Concerto Project series featured different works each week, and Thursday’s mixed bill included eight pieces in various stages of progress. While some rushed endings and not-quite-believable dramatic shifts pointed to areas for further development, captivating concepts, inventive movement, superior dancing, and the most racially diverse audience I’ve seen at a ballet concert all affirmed that LA needs its City Ballet.

Artistic Director Gardenhire’s “Salt” is a taut, restrained thriller (like Angelina Jolie’s new film?) that releases a fury of fiercely thrown limbs and then pulls back, tauntingly, at the height of the action – dancers strutting coolly and eyeing each other warily. Perris McCracken strikes through the space with charging chassés and biting lunges, torso at an aggressive forward pitch. Jessie Taylor joins her in a throwing, flicking face-off center stage, while Felicia Guzman, Genevieve Zander and Jin Cho build a circling, weaving, chasing counterpoint to their stationary standoff. I’m baffled when the dancers strip off their shirts at the end, but hopefully this piece is only a taste of more “Salt” to come, and maybe then all will become clear.

All is definitely not clear in CBLA dancer Mary Tarpley’s “Porcelain” – a love triangle that pulls me back and forth between confused and intrigued. Guzman and Zander are pushy, devoted sisters who dream about future love as they waltz wistfully in long tulle skirts. Zander’s prince shows up, but love’s not what she imagined, and being left out is definitely not what Guzman had in mind. Tarpley builds a funny, touching physical connection between the women, but it gets murky, or maybe just overly angsty, as Zander spends more time with Prince Juan Toledo-Espinoza and Guzman’s spirited dancing fades into vague reaching. The first and second sections feel disconnected, but the bond between the two women and the arresting partnering between Zander and Toledo-Espinoza clearly indicate an emerging choreographic talent.

Also promising is Rick Gonzales’ duet “Rabbit Hole,” where a shift in desire turns intense devotion to unwanted advances without warning. Here, Gonzales and McCracken join forces to let her fly and spin with superhuman height and speed, until she feels his assists as pushes and fights against them in dangerous collisions. Gonzales’ history with New York’s City Ballet surfaces in McCracken’s long-legged walks and contorted, bent-legged turns that look like Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments, and these angular elements keep the tension building. In the end, I can’t quite buy the drama because it doesn’t emerge convincingly from the dancers’ physicality, but I’m still looking forward to Gonzales’ next work.

And I’ll seek out every opportunity to be inspired by City Ballet’s dancers – like Taylor, who embodies the lingering strains of the cello in Gardenhire’s “La Vie Ante’rieure” with supremely satisfying musicality.

Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center welcomed the return of American Ballet Theatre to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, July 15-18, with 'The Sleeping Beauty' (pictured: Veronika Part and Marcelo Gomes). / Photo by Gene Schiavone

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 most recent reincarnation the result of executive decisions and choreographic additions by ABT Director Kevin McKenzie, 1970s prima ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, and dramaturge Michael Chernov. And since its 2007 premiere, this Beauty has been called “toddler-tailored,” “a mess,” and perhaps most damning of all, “Disney-esque,” by critics who know their Beauties.

But while the opening performance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, as part of Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center July 15-18, confirmed many of their criticisms, neither jarring omissions nor garish costumes could keep me from springing to my feet, propelled by the exhilaration that glorious art brings, when Princess Aurora (Gillian Murphy) and Prince Désiré (Marcelo Gomes) took their bows.

Yes, the central struggle between good and evil loses potency where dancing that communicates one force or the other has been trimmed out of the production. When the evil fairy Carabosse (Nancy Raffa) exits in a pyrotechnic blast at the end of the Prologue, for example, the curtain falls almost immediately, but we need to see the benevolent Lilac Fairy (Michele Wiles) restore classical order, harmony and balance, even for just a few moments, to believe that goodness has prevailed, that she has indeed softened Carabosse’s curse, and Aurora will not die, but only sleep, from a prick of the finger. And yes, the trimming gets really out of hand in Act II, when Prince Désiré sails to Aurora’s castle, battles Carabosse, finds his sleeping princess and wakes her all in such a hurry that I actually miss the kiss. Harrumph.

But other directorial decisions work with Marcelo Gomes’ brilliant performance to bring us a more believable, more admirable and endearing Désiré than I’ve encountered elsewhere. Instead of a moody, melancholy youth, this Désiré cavorts with friends and flirts with a countess until the Lilac Fairy reveals to him a larger purpose he can serve and a truer, deeper kind of love he can know. In a vision sequence that features some of Petipa’s most exquisite choreography, the prince glimpses the gentle, forthright Aurora through scattering, shifting lines of fairies who keep her at a dream’s elusive distance. His speedy decision to marry her might raise some eyebrows, but when the vision fades, his dancing conveys such a determined and irrepressible desire to act on his love that we believe him. And the shy smiles that creep across his face while he leaps and jumps with calm, assured strength at his wedding celebration suggest that each tour is an outpouring of sincere joy.

Désiré’s world, the world Aurora finds when she wakes, is modeled on the court of Louis XIV – the birthplace of classical ballet. And while the original Sleeping Beauty looked to celebrate this time period and identify St. Petersburg with it, the enormous curling wigs, exaggerated shows of gentility, and coquettish scheming in ABT’s version seem to function as foils to Aurora’s direct, unadorned clarity, restraint and humility. Gillian Murphy’s remarkable performance draws the contrast in sharp relief, as her arabesques crystallize like a delicate frost and sweeping, turning ports de bras bloom with the gentle inevitability of silently bursting rosebuds. In the Grand Pas de Deux, we fall in love with the subtleties of her dancing: in her sissones, the delightful delay in her second leg and the precise care with which she draws that lagging foot into neat contact with the first; in her renversés, the way she wholly devotes her eyes and arms and heart to a particular bend and direction, while her leg floats around and carries her away in another.

Petipa’s choreography still has the power to make us fall in love with his ballerina, but somehow The Sleeping Beauty also makes us, with none of Murphy’s splendor to speak of, feel loved. When Aurora pricks her finger and falls asleep, all around her think she’s dead. They’ve been told this isn’t so, but when faced with the appearance of disaster they forget and despair. Ah, these are my people. But instead of giving up on them, the Lilac Fairy mercifully reminds them that she has saved the princess from that dismal fate. And with her back to us, she glides to and fro, fingers flowing and arms waving tenderly in a caress that comforts as they fall under her spell.

As Richard Bona and his six musicians layer hot, slippery, overlapping rhythms, the bright shades of bossa nova, jazz and funk burst into the gray twilight and seem to push the heavy cloud cover far from the Hollywood hillside. Bona and company fade out riffing on Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” while the stage rotates to deliver Terence Blanchard’s ensemble front and center. As the sky deepens to black, the bright, easy energy of Bona’s set now focuses to a single, searingly radiant point. In white spotlight, Blanchard’s Cuban pianist Fabian Almazan pulls what sounds like a rushing, hesitating farewell from the keys in Aaron Parks’ achingly beautiful “Ashé,” and Blanchard joins him with gently throbbing trumpet.

After such gripping intensity, the entrance of dancers in Choices – choreographed by Lula Washington to excerpts from Blanchard’s new album – initially feels disappointingly dissipated. Scattered thinly across the vast stage space, the dancers’ serpentine arms and languid poses don’t quite connect with Dr. Cornel West’s recorded reflections: “justice is what love looks like in public … braininess falls short of what it means to be human and making the right choices.”

But then a compelling conversation between movement and music emerges; dancers echo Blanchard’s running, trilling trumpeting with surging shakes side to side, and later on, a vertical throw of the arms ricochets through the group as unpredictably as the notes ring out in Almazan’s piano solos. In a setting that naturally overpowers the human form, Washington’s work resonates where she partners effectively with the surrounding forces to reach us through the distance. When a wave of twirls sweeps dancers across the stage in a blur of swirling white just as a gust of wind rolls off the hillside and through the Bowl, the effect is sublime.

West intensifies the choice of “what kina human being you gonna be” by asking in the same breath, “how do we prepare for death?” Our ultimate limitation heightens the significance of each decision, and Washington eloquently suggests this truth by distilling the action to a single, focused duet. Here, deliberate gestures – by turns passionate, fearful, and painstakingly careful – carry tremendous weight, and the couple periodically cracks under the pressure, circling their arms wildly to cast off the load.

Music, words and movement surge and crash together in a final collage evoking the “history of black people in America.” Dancers fly onstage with exuberant Lindy kicks, and a woman in turquoise responds to Blanchard’s rhythms with jumps like hiccups – bent forward at the waist and arms hanging loose in the West African style that lies at the root of American jazz, tap and modern dance. “Hope … Katrina … black bodies hanging from southern trees,” West’s deluge of words suggests endurance rather than resolution, and the dancers’ flapping, stomping, grooving exit and the band’s final blast testify to this spirit.

Headliners Femi Kuti & The Positive Force close out the evening with biting social commentary, friendly call and response song, raging horns, pulsating rhythms that accelerate and sustain at impossible speeds, and remarkable dancing that feeds off and fuels it all. All the band members dance, but the three women who sing backup dance incessantly – skittering on the balls of their feet, jumping into low turns, and miraculously producing contrasting, shifting rhythms in feet, knees, hips, rib cage, arms. The movement reveals musical qualities my ears can’t access, and I’m grateful for the chance to experience jazz as a fully embodied form.

Jazz at the Bowl 2010 continues July 14 with Smokey Robinson and Lizz Wright, and Lula Washington Dance Theatre next performs as part of the Grand Performances series, on July 30 at California Plaza in downtown LA.

Dance Camera West brings Anne Linsel's "Pina Bausch" to the Hammer Museum on June 12. Photo courtesy of Dance Camera West/Pina Bausch/Anne Linsel

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 the contour of his cheek.

A peek at the trailer for the Dance Camera West Festival, which begins June 4, and you’ll quickly understand why Los Angeles has been clamoring for more since Lynette Kessler brought two evenings of dance films to the Getty in 2002. A dancer, choreographer and filmmaker herself, Kessler showed 14 works by various artists in that first Dance Camera West Festival. Audience members at the two sold-out screenings were incensed, Kessler recalls. “People said, ‘Why haven’t I seen this before? Where can I see more?’”

“Beguine,” one of the films appearing at the festival’s June 4 opening at REDCAT, feels like the raucous end of a wedding reception, when people can get ugly, and things can get strange. Through a fog, we see men in untucked shirts and women in rumpled dresses swing and jump and shake in slow motion, while the wooden floor creaks and rocks beneath us like a wave-tossed ship. A tilt finally tips one unsteady reveler out of the wedding party, and suddenly we’re tumbling, sliding, careening with him, triple-speed, down a rocky slope.

This is dance that speaks the language of today’s audiences, especially for residents of a city so steeped in film culture. Like Kessler says, “Everybody’s a film critic. Everybody’s been watching film their whole life, and they’re very invested in it, and they have something to say about it … so it’s engaging.”

Throughout the month of June, the ninth annual Dance Camera West Festival brings short films, documentaries, panel discussions and dance media installations from across the globe to REDCAT, the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk, UCLA’s Hammer Museum, the Screen Actors Guild, Cheviot Hills Rec Center, Timothy Yarger Fine Art of Beverly Hills, and the Grand Performances series at California Plaza. Kessler explains that festival events are “spread all over town” in order to build audience. DCW ticket prices don’t hurt either; admission for opening weekend screenings at REDCAT is only $10 to $15, and all other festival events are free.

“It really is fun to turn people on to it.” Kessler’s voice rises with excitement as she describes viewer responses to dance films she’s shown. “They come in and they’re just gasping and clapping and laughing and being involved in the kinesthetic experience. … With film you’re right there with [the dancers], sweating with them.”

As the festival has extended its reach to new populations and parts of the city over the past decade, the geographical scope of work presented has also exploded. “Burkina Faso, Iran, Estonia, Uruguay, Cuba …” Kessler rattles off a list of countries represented by recent DCW submissions. Advances in filmmaking technology – like the relatively affordable one-chip video camera – allow artists around the world to produce work in increasing numbers. But if it weren’t for Dance Camera West, Kessler shakes her head emphatically, “you would not see these films in Southern California.”

This year’s festival brings significant new works by established international choreographers, and introduces the most talented emerging artists and the latest dance film experiments to Los Angeles audiences. At the Hammer Museum’s Pina Bausch Symposium, two documentaries by celebrated German director Anne Linsel will have their West Coast premieres. The outdoor Local Makers screening at Cheviot Hills features films by 25 local artists, as well as works by budding filmmakers from LAUSD middle and high schools. And for Kessler, the experimental dance shorts included in the SurREEL Moves screening at the Hammer represent a particularly exciting “push forward into a new territory of work.”

Although it’s been a whirlwind nine years, Kessler insists, “I always get refreshed from looking at the work.” Come and be refreshed by Dance Camera West’s offerings this summer.

June 2010 Dance Camera West Festival Schedule

For complete information, please visit the festival website.

Dance Media Screen Innovations*

Three different programs of experimental dance media

Friday, June 4, at 8 p.m. ($15) and Saturday, June 5, at 6 and 8 p.m. ($10), REDCAT

Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk

Dance Media Installations

Thursday, June 10, 6-9 p.m.

A Weekend at the Hammer Museum

Pina Bausch Symposium

Saturday, June 12, 4:30 and 7 p.m.

SurREEL Moves: Weird & Wonderful Experimental Dance Shorts*

Sunday, June 13, 7 p.m.

Choreography in Media: A Panel Discussion

Wednesday, June 16, 7-9 p.m. at the Screen Actors Guild

Local Makers – LA Choreographers and Directors

Saturday, June 19, 8-10 p.m. at Cheviot Hills Recreation Center (behind the building)

Media and Choreography Installations

Saturday, June 26, 6 and 7:30 p.m. at Timothy Yarger Fine Art of Beverly Hills

Reservations required for this event. RSVP to (310) 278-4400 or info@yargerfineart.com.

Dzi Croquettes*

Brazilian documentary of all-male cabaret group

Sunday, June 27, 8 p.m. at California Plaza

*contains nudity or adult content

All members of the ensemble – a trio of musicians led by composer Robert Een and a quartet of movers – are deeply embedded in the work, but together the seven craft and unpack the portrait of only a single person. Popkin’s dancing collaborators intrigue but do not invite us to know them, and their wanderings into and out of the stage space and Popkin’s solos suggest that they’re here to reveal something about him.

Almost always at least part-pachyderm, Peggy Piacenza shuffles in the shadows behind Popkin, echoes his movements, and drifts offstage again – a specter of Valecia Philips’ surging, fading, otherworldly vocals within Een’s gorgeous score. She’s a comforting childhood memory with a plush elephant’s round tummy and saggy bum. With circling wrists and serpentine arms that sometimes look like Bharatanatyam, she dances calmly for us, occasionally stilling her inappropriately swinging trunk with one soft elephant foot.

We see Ishmael Houston-Jones in off-balanced struggle and earnest effort, but exaggerated facial expression and stiff formality keep him at a distance. With sudden, jerky shifts to maintain weight over his left foot, he circles and waves his right limbs in a strangely one-sided dance, juggling these competing physical identities until the right-sided undulations knock him into a high-stepping stumble to the left. But later on, a small triumph. His stomping and beckoning seems a weak approximation of an Indian classical dance until speed and intensity build to a focused frenzy, and his commitment makes us believe this dance – whatever it might be – is his.

Unlike his mysterious companions, Popkin meets us face-to-face in a downstage pool of light, and we get to know him as he breathes. First he blows gently, playfully, at us. Then internal gusts of air sweep him into deep backbends, and swirling currents course wildly through his body, forcing him to gulp and rebound, or choke and sputter. Sometimes his torso works like a bellows directing the flow, and sometimes he is a vessel filled and carried by this inner stream. And somewhere in the midst of the turmoil, I realize that his physical situation suggests tension and blurred boundaries between individual choice and environmental determination.

Moments of clarity like this one reveal the choreographer’s ability to speak powerfully through the body’s physical language. In Popkin’s duets with the long-limbed Carolyn Hall, his identity merges with and disappears into hers when he allows Hall to place one finger inside his mouth and direct their united action. Individual freedom is the obstacle to harmony here, and we feel his loss just as we enjoy the strange beauty of their single diving, falling, four-armed form – one that recalls images of Ganesh with so many arms.

In duets between Popkin and the on-screen elephant, the animal gains dignity with the mediated distance, and in its cheerful dances and thoughtful stillnesses, seems to watch over and encourage his partner. Facing away from the screen, Popkin sometimes joins his guardian in a simple sway, or swings a leg loosely like a trunk, and we feel the unconscious connection between them. And when Popkin, stripped to briefs so we can appreciate his very human legs, puts the headpiece on backwards, his strange form seems to hold the full possibilities of two identities simultaneously.

Lionel Popkin’s There Is an Elephant in This Dance continues at REDCAT at 8:30 p.m. on May 22 and at 3 p.m. on May 23. Tickets are $20 ($16 for students with current I.D.) and are available at www.redcat.org or by calling (213) 237-2800.