Back in the days after ballet was remodeled into weight-bearing modern dance, after choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage brought chance encounters front and center, and just as the Judson Church revolutionaries de-constructed movement into post-modernism, Steve Paxton explored how “untrained” bodies could develop a dance form that came to be known as Contact […]
The Philharmonic Society of Orange County presents eighth blackbird on Sunday, April 24, at 3 p.m. Multi-Grammy-winning contemporary classical ensemble eighth blackbird teams up with composer supergroup Sleeping Giant for “Hand Eye,” an all-new suite of six pieces, each piece crafted by one Sleeping Giant composer and highlighting one eighth blackbird musician. There will be […]
The Los Angeles Master Chorale, led by Artistic Director Grant Gershon, opens the 2015-16 season, its 52nd, with “The Russian Evolution,” a program of sublime Russian choral works grand and intimate, including the West Coast premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina’s seminal “The Canticle of the Sun,” “a glorious sonic cloudburst” (New Zealand Herald) based on the […]
As part of their “Americana” series of productions this summer, Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum is offering up Green Grow the Lilacs, a 1931 play by Lynn Riggs that, while rarely performed itself, was the inspiration for the mega-hit musical Oklahoma!. If you like old-timey songs, plainspoken country folk and homespun charms, this ode to America […]
Though it was quite a few decades ago when the legendary pioneering dancer/choreographer Martha Graham spent a part of her teenage years in Santa Barbara, her still-operating New York City-based dance company is visiting the Southland this weekend. Presenting only one performance at the Valley Performing Arts Center on the campus of California State University, […]
One hundred two years ago, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky premiered his groundbreaking and controversial score to the Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes performance of choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, “Le Sacre du Printemps” (Rite of Spring). Since that revolutionary event, the very same aural composition has inspired other artists to interpret the work in a myriad of […]
