In its second year of presenting new cross-genre performance work created by our very own Los Angeles Performance Practice, the Bootleg Theater and Show Box L.A. are bringing two strong and innovative voices front and center in the 2014 Live Arts Exchange Festival (LAX). Drawing from the performing arts of dance, music, theater, video and multi-disciplinary, this weekend highlights choreographer/performer Meg Wolfe and Grand Lady Dance House director/performer Jennie Mary Tai Liu.
Within a production schedule that allows several opportunities to see each artist with her collaborators, the shows run from Saturday, Sept. 13, through Tuesday, Sept. 16, with both afternoon and evening start times at the co-producing theater in Echo Park.
Wolfe will offer “New Faithful Disco,” a work-in-progress performed by her and two of the city’s finest contemporary movers: taisha paggett and Rae Shao-Lan. Described in promotional materials as the first phase of something “big . . . Love, faith, impermanence? Pleasure? Power? Soul retrieval?,” this exploration features Maria de los Angeles (Cuca) Esteves’ layered score of natural sounds and disco rhythms transmitted by three cassette players.
In “Actress Fury,” Grand Lady Dance House invites the audience backstage/downstairs in the dressing rooms as “magnetic” creative collaborating performers Hannah Heller, Alexa Weir and Liu wrestle with what is described as “one actress’ desire to be extraordinary.” Hmmm. That may have some resonance in our City of Angels.
Referencing three personal stories of ambition — Sophocles’ Ajax, the diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky and the recollections of abstract painter Bridget Riley — the subtext here reveals the experience of “being female and an artist in the wake of third wave feminism.”
Sounds like something that we can chew on even after the performance has ended.
—Benn Widdey, Culture Spot LA
For more information about the festival, visit https://liveartsexchange.org/home. Tickets are $15/Meg Wolfe and $20/Grand Lady Dance. Visit https://liveartsexchange.org/tickets/.