No one in their right mind thinks the ballet stage needs any more dancing sweets, yet there was something irresistible about the announcement that American Ballet Theatre Artist-in-Residence Alexei Ratmansky planned to resurrect Richard Strauss’ 1924 two-act ballet “Schlagobers” (Whipped Cream) with sets and costumes by the inimitable Mark Ryden. … [Read more...]
Dance in L.A. Museums Unleashes the Spirits
If you haven't seen dance at a museum lately, some good news. Gone are the days when dancers were brought in like bulky decor to inhabit dead gallery space. Synchronicity abounds, tickets are still low cost (often free) and the payoff can be huge. In fact, some of the best dance I've ever seen has been in galleries. In the last few years, … [Read more...]
Boredom Unpacked & the Cosmos Rebuilt: A Week with Forsythe, Noë and de Keersmaeker in L.A
“The proximity of boredom to the work of art is somehow a clue to what art is and does,” said the captivating UC Berkeley philosophy professor Alva Noë during a talk with former Ballet Frankfurt choreographer William Forsythe at Los Angeles' Getty Museum on Nov. 12th. It was a quick, fascinating lecture that also addressed whether choreography can … [Read more...]
Dancers in the Architecture
As a lover of dance and a lover of architecture, I was both excited and fearful about “HomeLA,” the dance performance held on May 4th in a private home on the cliffside heights of Mount Washington. Directed by Rebecca Bruno, working in partnership with the Dance Resource Center and the dance lab Pietor, the recent site-specific event advertised 14 … [Read more...]
Blessed Stillness of Trisha Brown Retrospective at CAP-UCLA
A funny thing happened when Amelia Rudolph, artistic director of Oakland-based BANDALOOP dance company, launched into the very rare, permit-heavy re-staging of Trisha Brown's "Man Walking Down the Side of a Building" (1970) during the Brown Dance Company Retrospective on Friday evening at CAP-UCLA. Just as she crested the edge of the 8-plus story … [Read more...]
Doug Varone the Painter-Choreographer
"I'm like a painter," said choreographer Doug Varone during his opening remarks for "Stripped/Dressed," the unique program on choreographic process and performance that he and his company of dancers brought to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts' Off-Center Festival in Costa Mesa on January 25-26 2013. The phrase sounds a little poetic (wouldn't a … [Read more...]
Rockwell’s Rockwells
[this article originally ran on Crosscut] In 1943, Norman Rockwell — then America’s most popular artist, with regular Saturday Evening Post covers, annual Boy Scout calendars, plus scores of major U.S. advertising campaigns — was tapped by the Office of War Information to create a series of posters titled "The Four Freedoms." Based on the … [Read more...]