Red alert, to anyone anywhere near Northern California on Oct. 24: Akram Khan is presenting his latest piece,“iTMOi” (“In the Mind of Igor”), which sounds amazing, at the UC Davis campus theatre next week. This blog page doesn't usually run preview notices, but this is the ONLY U.S. performance during the London-based company's international tour. … [Read more...]
Australian Ballet’s Earthly, Wrenching ‘Swan Lake’
While it sounded unpredictable on paper, the 12th season of Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center opened on a high note with the West Coast debut of Australian Ballet’s “Swan Lake,” choreographer Graeme Murphy’s 2002 reimagining of Tchaikovsky’s epic beauty through the lens of the Princess Diana tragedy. Though a hybrid … [Read more...]
Garth Fagan’s Ancient, Electric Storms
Back in 1991, when Tony Award-winning choreographer Garth Fagan first teamed with jazz composer Wynton Marsalis, Fagan gave Marsalis a poem he had written in the voice of a West African storyteller to use as a centering theme for the music of “Griot New York.” The juncture of these two revered artists made for soaring, warmth-spreading … [Read more...]
Do You Think You Know Gene Kelly?
Teasing apart the movie musical a few years back, cultural critic Gilberto Perez wrote that each successful musical positions one of two figures of the artist in the fore: either the performer or the director. Sometimes, as in "The Band Wagon," we actually see the two figures characterized on film, fighting for prominence. But usually, one of the … [Read more...]
Top 10 Must-See Dance Concerts in L.A. this Year
If you count carefully, you'll actually find 16 concerts listed here. I expanded the roundup I wrote for the OC Register -- which highlights the great companies that Orange County's deep-pocketed Segerstrom Center and Irvine Barclay can bring in -- to add a few more affordable offerings in Los Angeles and beyond. It's a good year for dance: read … [Read more...]
Osipova and Vasiliev Debut World Tour at California’s Segerstrom Center
In the promotional image for “Solo for Two,” the first independent concert tour from dance superstars Ivan Vasiliev and Natalia Osipova, the formidable Russian dancers appeared side by side in dramatic grand-allegro jumps that would have certainly resulted in a mid-air crash were it not a collaged image. Culled, it seems, from promo shots for … [Read more...]
Essential Viewing: Ethan Stiefel’s “Giselle” for Royal New Zealand Ballet
On Friday night, opening its first U.S. tour in decades, Royal Ballet New Zealand performed on L.A.'s premium dance stage, the Los Angeles Music Center, presenting the U.S. premiere of a new "Giselle," the company's first full-length creation under the guidance of artistic director Ethan Stiefel, who took the helm of the company in 2011. Here … [Read more...]
A Fizzled Evening with Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal
The house was packed. The second-ever dance company to perform at the cushy new Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal easily sold out its two-night run (January 10-11 2014), and was welcomed by a good faith audience, comfortable and ready to cheer. The program had strong local ties, with … [Read more...]
Great Moments in L.A. Dance in 2013
With strong flavors of Stravinsky, Balanchine, and Trisha Brown, 2013 was a satisfying year for iconic dance, and dance music, in Los Angeles. The centennial of Stravinsky’s game-changing “Rite of Spring” for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes delivered unto us both the Joffrey’s faithful reconstruction of the nervy Nijinsky choreography and, earlier in … [Read more...]
Blood-Rich ‘Beauty’
Considered the consummate classical ballet, "The Sleeping Beauty" features devilishly hard technical challenges, with nowhere to hide. Traditional stagings -- like Pacific Northwest Ballet's long, rich, drafty one -- have pretty vapid storylines. Instead, the audience identifies with the dancers' technical struggles. That's the meaningful, heroic … [Read more...]