...You know that star burst thick glass makes when it's struck? I'm pretty sure that's what the Western dance world would look like as a cultural window. Here we have this clear, pristine thing that teaches royalty and wannabes how to do Pavans and Galliards and get the man or get the woman and make the right marriage and keep the act going. Here we have it on show for the kings' pals. Frontal presentation has obvious appeal (look at me! look at me!) so here we have ballet. Here we have Ballanchine bringing ballet to its effervescent extreme (goodbye, cheeseburgers) after his buddies at the Ballet Russes found new ways to jazz up (what an awful metaphor for this context!) the old material, and here--watch closely--we have Vaudeville- and theater- and academically-trained Moderns making that unhappy sound a Mac computer makes when you click somewhere you shouldn't as they run, repeatedly, into this thick glass window that's been built up around an old and now considerably dated form of courtship boogie.
Listen to the satisfying crunch of the window as, after fifty plus years of Moderns' pushing it, Merce Cunningham finally punches it.
That being said, ol' Merce didn't shatter all of dance entirely. The heteronormative frontal performative virtuosic music-obeying smiling presenting dances of dance are alive and well and
(big development)
I like it. I mean, apparently all kinds of viewership like it, since I can't imagine anyone watches So You Think You Can Dance for the inter-dancer drama. But after a BA in the history of that star burst, I think I'd forgotten the virtues of what an old prof might call Miss Trixie's School of Ballet and Tap. This week I saw Carnival: The Choreographers' Ball and Up On The Roof, where--yep, on a roof--the high-kicking kids with huge smiles and often breathtaking dance technique inaugurated the Debbie Allen Dance Academy move to Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza between those two neighborhoods. Miss Trixie must have done something right. These kids are confident, disciplined, happy as very agile clams, and on their way to being the confident, disciplined, happy adults I saw at Carnival. I'm not knockin' the moderns who put more into stage composition and the intellectual question of why dance. I can't. They're brilliant. But brilliant, too, is a program with over 80% of the students on scholarship and 100% of the managerial staff doubtlessly worked to the bone and everyone pleased as punch to be showing or shown a double axle in a number set to seven of the most recent top forty in whatever genre it is that includes the Black Eyed Peas and "If You Seek Amy".
I'd bring back the window metaphor if I could, but it's early and I'm tired and it's off to another day of adventures in sunny CA. Time to test out these pesky lower abdominals and see if I can at least start jamming out in the kitchen again without pain...
LADB
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Slacker
The VideoDanza and DCW event in Van Nuys this past Saturday was lovely! It featured only films from South America, so thanks to the lack of local I watched without taking notes. I haven't been dancing (or doing much of anything else) since it turns out that pulling abdominal muscles hinders just about every kind of activity. All of this adds up to my feeling terribly lazy. But I'll be up and at 'em again ASAP...
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Sweating, and the Small Stuff
Tonight I saw b-boys round robin at LA Valley College, using the sprung gymnastic floor to take falls that might end a dance on concrete. I got Parkour tips from high school boys who’d take a tumble and come back jumping. I watched in awe while girls and women from tween to twenty-something and men nearing middle age worked their rudimentary gymnastics; a group of competitive elderly meanwhile climbed hanging ropes under the clock. It wasn’t concert dance. The lights were fluorescent, not Fresnels. But the bodies were in motion, and I was moved.
Cheese.
However clumsily, what I’m getting at is this: I had a very long day. I’ve heard the words “hiring freeze” too many times, and I—like about 10% of Angelenos, or so I hear—would so appreciate being employed. But for a few well-spent dollars in North Hollywood I could forget about that, warm up, do my body work, and admire others’ as well. The roadblocks of life don’t seem so bad when I’m vaulting over blue mats that are much, much bigger.
LADB
Cheese.
However clumsily, what I’m getting at is this: I had a very long day. I’ve heard the words “hiring freeze” too many times, and I—like about 10% of Angelenos, or so I hear—would so appreciate being employed. But for a few well-spent dollars in North Hollywood I could forget about that, warm up, do my body work, and admire others’ as well. The roadblocks of life don’t seem so bad when I’m vaulting over blue mats that are much, much bigger.
LADB
Sunday, June 14, 2009
With the Times
Contra-Tiempo is an LA-based modern dance company infused with Latin dance and a social consciousness, the work of Ana María Alvarez and a devoted collective of dancers, musicians, and other artists. Contra-Tiempo is also Spanish for “Against The Times,” but having heard the urban outcry of this company’s work for the first time last night, I’d say they’re quite in tune with the times—and perhaps even redirecting them. At the incredible converted bank building that is The New Los Angeles Theatre Center (better known simply as The New LATC) on Spring Street downtown, Contra-Tiempo brought out three rep pieces and one new work for a single evening of dance.
“I Dream America”, a 2008 set of seven dances, opened the program. With its exploration of “the tensions, commonalities, strains, and histories between the Black and Latino communities,” it brings to the table both the racial tension of C-T’s (and our) city home and the literal moving and shaking one can do to loosen it. There are b-boy and square dance steps, salsa and solos. In the final progression of exhausted, changed, and empowered movers across the stage, the layers of the piece cohere: the video images with the “I Been ‘Buked” unison, the angry voices with the outstretched arms of the people on stage and, it seems, the people they represent. And that is perhaps the most moving aspect of C-T: they are people. They are incredible dancers making work in a very difficult time for making work, but more than that they are the faces of awareness and outreach in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
The remainder of the program was varied, from the new tongue-in-cheek Fosse-isms of “Plastico” to the sweet duet “Al Alba Ache” and “contra-tiempo/against the times”, a 2006 work that seems to be the company’s signature. Sound credits include the words of Cesar Chavez, Lolita Lebrón, and Pablo Neruda, as well as the impressive sound design of Cesar Alvarez, whose work was used throughout the program. The closer brought to mind again what I enthusiastically scrawled in the margins some time earlier, between clapping and shouting (it’s encouraged): “These are people! Who dance!” Plenty went wrong, production-wise: a late start, a pesky projector logo, a runaway water bottle on stage (twice). But production value isn't the point. The supreme dance technique isn’t the point. (That’s plastic, really.) This is a broad scope of topics and outcries, but that isn’t the point, either. The heart of it, the point I can see, is generating and sustaining the courage to make dances about the facts and the frictions of Los Angeles, tapping into its races and its communities at large. The Latin dances at C-T’s movement base make a foundation for social interaction. Much the same, the subjects the company attacks makes a firm foundation for vivid awareness in Los Angeles.
LADB
“I Dream America”, a 2008 set of seven dances, opened the program. With its exploration of “the tensions, commonalities, strains, and histories between the Black and Latino communities,” it brings to the table both the racial tension of C-T’s (and our) city home and the literal moving and shaking one can do to loosen it. There are b-boy and square dance steps, salsa and solos. In the final progression of exhausted, changed, and empowered movers across the stage, the layers of the piece cohere: the video images with the “I Been ‘Buked” unison, the angry voices with the outstretched arms of the people on stage and, it seems, the people they represent. And that is perhaps the most moving aspect of C-T: they are people. They are incredible dancers making work in a very difficult time for making work, but more than that they are the faces of awareness and outreach in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
The remainder of the program was varied, from the new tongue-in-cheek Fosse-isms of “Plastico” to the sweet duet “Al Alba Ache” and “contra-tiempo/against the times”, a 2006 work that seems to be the company’s signature. Sound credits include the words of Cesar Chavez, Lolita Lebrón, and Pablo Neruda, as well as the impressive sound design of Cesar Alvarez, whose work was used throughout the program. The closer brought to mind again what I enthusiastically scrawled in the margins some time earlier, between clapping and shouting (it’s encouraged): “These are people! Who dance!” Plenty went wrong, production-wise: a late start, a pesky projector logo, a runaway water bottle on stage (twice). But production value isn't the point. The supreme dance technique isn’t the point. (That’s plastic, really.) This is a broad scope of topics and outcries, but that isn’t the point, either. The heart of it, the point I can see, is generating and sustaining the courage to make dances about the facts and the frictions of Los Angeles, tapping into its races and its communities at large. The Latin dances at C-T’s movement base make a foundation for social interaction. Much the same, the subjects the company attacks makes a firm foundation for vivid awareness in Los Angeles.
LADB
Friday, June 12, 2009
It Works!
Now that I’ve seen dances for humans and intelligent pets, I strongly encourage attendance. The pieces are varied, the setting is deluxe, and whether or not this matters to anyone but me, the dancers and choreographers are really nice. In a world where support for the arts normally means support for orchestras and art classes, work in dance can make a person awfully dour. Not here!
I only acquired program notes after seeing the pieces sans title or credit, but no complaints. Every work spoke for itself. In her opening solo, “Moth – Asomati”, dancer/choreographer Liz Hoefner drapes David Parson’s strobe light work in “Caught” with a sepia dress, making the performer an icon both of vulnerability and of femininity. What might in lesser hands have become a ramble becomes, in Hoefner’s, a series of disjointed thoughts as erratic and engaging as the lights. In one moment she is a whirlwind of limbs and leaps, in the next she is crouched and defensive. In my moment of choice she steps out of the icon altogether when a tic (an exhale, a shake of the head) makes the soloist terribly, tragically human. In retrospect, Hoefner’s process statement makes perfect sense! You can read it when you see the program.
I’m slightly less satisfied with a trio in slickers, but I’m sure that’s only because I wanted a longer time to savor Hoefner’s impression. Maggie Lee’s “Chatter” puts three dancers in skin-tone lingerie and life-sized Zip-Loc bags, and in an exploration of the vast stage floor (which is, I should mention, at the audience’s level) they become a corps de modern with their shadows. Furthermore, the choreography handily isolates the performers from their humanity: it’s there to be seen, as obvious as the lingerie, but somewhere between the gestures and the non-functioning backwards run, the plastic wrap and the performance take precedence over the skin and the performers. I realize that this doesn’t quite mesh with Lee’s program notes, but that’s the fun of objective viewership, and I like the piece both ways.
“The Clandestine Life of Recycled Clothes” arrives just before Intermission. Remembering “Out Fitted” at The Open Space last week, I can’t help but commend how well Rebekah Davidson uses the cloth-and-plastic-cups havoc on stage. A soloist takes on more objects and a slightly modified identity with every dance step: a bathrobe here, a pair of sunglasses there, a plastic cup. When four like-dressed women arrive on the stage with their own plastic cups, we see the whole identity de- and reconstructed in vocal commands, lighting design, and good ol’ contemporary modern stock movement vocabulary. (I want to note that, mid-piece, I thought “Is this Phillip Glass?” It was!) That middle section of the aforesaid stock could be its own piece, but the rest of “The Clandestine…” felt satisfyingly cohesive. I’m just sorry that the regular audience won’t get to see the Intermission dance that followed on Thursday! Like Trisha Brown through a kaleidoscope.
I’m afraid the cup of coffee I got at Brewer’s kicked in during Carol McDowell’s “Surrender”, which really is Trisha Brown through a kaleidoscope. (There are a lot of exclamations in my notes. “I like these angles!” “Dance>Music! Yes!” “AND THE SQUARE IS NOW FIVE AISLES!”) The middle level and the flailing arms got a little disengaging, but I enjoy the diegetic vocal commands. Furthermore, just as I was writing some comment about the lack of contact, there was the most satisfying and unexpected embrace upstage, and I was won. Between that and the final disorientation of the lighting (see this program!), “Surrender” was complete.
The clickclickclick of the rehearsal photographer notwithstanding, “Hit The Spot” did just that, and wrapped up DHIP. I got the impression that the voices in the sound recording were emanating in real time from the dancers’ minds. In an exercise of memory and recollection, this quartet of Hoefner’s, including herself (she might be my hero?) showed the wacky disarray brains will go into when thoughts rain in and out, the same way bodies go into wacky disarray with inversions and lunges and all of the nonsensical things modern dance makes us do. Doris Humphrey said all dances are too long, and she might be right with this one, but if anything it reflects how endless the circular train tracks of recollecive thought are.
Mind status: blown.
Brevity may be the soul of wit, but the blog is about saying as much as I want. I don't get the program title, but I hope I’ve said enough to sell some tickets to DHIP. Again, many thanks to the directors for the accommodating dress rehearsal.
LADB
I only acquired program notes after seeing the pieces sans title or credit, but no complaints. Every work spoke for itself. In her opening solo, “Moth – Asomati”, dancer/choreographer Liz Hoefner drapes David Parson’s strobe light work in “Caught” with a sepia dress, making the performer an icon both of vulnerability and of femininity. What might in lesser hands have become a ramble becomes, in Hoefner’s, a series of disjointed thoughts as erratic and engaging as the lights. In one moment she is a whirlwind of limbs and leaps, in the next she is crouched and defensive. In my moment of choice she steps out of the icon altogether when a tic (an exhale, a shake of the head) makes the soloist terribly, tragically human. In retrospect, Hoefner’s process statement makes perfect sense! You can read it when you see the program.
I’m slightly less satisfied with a trio in slickers, but I’m sure that’s only because I wanted a longer time to savor Hoefner’s impression. Maggie Lee’s “Chatter” puts three dancers in skin-tone lingerie and life-sized Zip-Loc bags, and in an exploration of the vast stage floor (which is, I should mention, at the audience’s level) they become a corps de modern with their shadows. Furthermore, the choreography handily isolates the performers from their humanity: it’s there to be seen, as obvious as the lingerie, but somewhere between the gestures and the non-functioning backwards run, the plastic wrap and the performance take precedence over the skin and the performers. I realize that this doesn’t quite mesh with Lee’s program notes, but that’s the fun of objective viewership, and I like the piece both ways.
“The Clandestine Life of Recycled Clothes” arrives just before Intermission. Remembering “Out Fitted” at The Open Space last week, I can’t help but commend how well Rebekah Davidson uses the cloth-and-plastic-cups havoc on stage. A soloist takes on more objects and a slightly modified identity with every dance step: a bathrobe here, a pair of sunglasses there, a plastic cup. When four like-dressed women arrive on the stage with their own plastic cups, we see the whole identity de- and reconstructed in vocal commands, lighting design, and good ol’ contemporary modern stock movement vocabulary. (I want to note that, mid-piece, I thought “Is this Phillip Glass?” It was!) That middle section of the aforesaid stock could be its own piece, but the rest of “The Clandestine…” felt satisfyingly cohesive. I’m just sorry that the regular audience won’t get to see the Intermission dance that followed on Thursday! Like Trisha Brown through a kaleidoscope.
I’m afraid the cup of coffee I got at Brewer’s kicked in during Carol McDowell’s “Surrender”, which really is Trisha Brown through a kaleidoscope. (There are a lot of exclamations in my notes. “I like these angles!” “Dance>Music! Yes!” “AND THE SQUARE IS NOW FIVE AISLES!”) The middle level and the flailing arms got a little disengaging, but I enjoy the diegetic vocal commands. Furthermore, just as I was writing some comment about the lack of contact, there was the most satisfying and unexpected embrace upstage, and I was won. Between that and the final disorientation of the lighting (see this program!), “Surrender” was complete.
The clickclickclick of the rehearsal photographer notwithstanding, “Hit The Spot” did just that, and wrapped up DHIP. I got the impression that the voices in the sound recording were emanating in real time from the dancers’ minds. In an exercise of memory and recollection, this quartet of Hoefner’s, including herself (she might be my hero?) showed the wacky disarray brains will go into when thoughts rain in and out, the same way bodies go into wacky disarray with inversions and lunges and all of the nonsensical things modern dance makes us do. Doris Humphrey said all dances are too long, and she might be right with this one, but if anything it reflects how endless the circular train tracks of recollecive thought are.
Mind status: blown.
Brevity may be the soul of wit, but the blog is about saying as much as I want. I don't get the program title, but I hope I’ve said enough to sell some tickets to DHIP. Again, many thanks to the directors for the accommodating dress rehearsal.
LADB
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
A Lot to Los Angeles
I’ve reserved my ticket for Contra-Tiempo. I’ve been giving equal stare time to Sam Rockwell (new movie!) and the postcard for dances for humans and intelligent pets, trying to decide which one will win my Friday night. (Probably the latter--sorry, Sammy.) I’ve filled out two job applications at Children’s Hospital saying that evenings and weekends are for dancing, not working, laughed and cringed at the idea of being a hall monkey for a Disney venue, and eaten half a bowl of tasty hummus thinking about what the heck I can do to be employed here!
The point is, dance is everywhere. For all these long days of not having a job, my time is certainly filling up with dance events. I also emailed a friend of a friend about trying Parkour around the city. Gotta get movin'! What better way?
LADB
The point is, dance is everywhere. For all these long days of not having a job, my time is certainly filling up with dance events. I also emailed a friend of a friend about trying Parkour around the city. Gotta get movin'! What better way?
LADB
Monday, June 8, 2009
No Stranger Here
Contact Improv LA is one of the reasons I made my way out here. In a studio with skylights and a smooth wooden floor on Santa Monica Boulevard in the eponymous coastal town, a group of bodies as diverse as Steve Paxton probably dreamed meets weekly, and with some variety of attendees, to jam. Last night was my third time (I visited in March). After an academic semester of it dried out the juicy parts, CI has been brought back to life! The atmosphere is casual, the studio is serene, and the post-jam food run is going to be a habit. I think last night’s binge may have actually turned at least my extremities into some of Swinger’s tasty vegan chocolate chip pancakes.
LADB
LADB
Sunday, June 7, 2009
The Achilles, Unproverbially
“Hey go to Redcat tonight. Dance for the Camera Festival. Great way for you to meet people and see the scene.” A few Metro stops later and I was at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in the part my pal called its garage. (I’ll try to think of it as a magical spare room.) The second and third inaugural weekend programs of Dance Camera West's 2009 series were screening, and in spite of the overload of seeing a lot of art in rapid succession, the selections brought out the best aspects of dance displayed through film. Have you ever looked at the backs of a person’s heels? In part of a Finnish film in the second program, the frog’s eye view or so from behind soloist and director Alexandra Campbell’s heels is all we get to see, and it’s a masterpiece. Belling out at the base, arcing up along the tendon… wow. That, I think, is the best part of dance for the camera. Heels are all over the place on a live stage, but Campbell’s direction put their close-up in the metaphorical spotlight. Put to good use, that ability is breathtaking.
As for Los Angeles films, there were two. Rae Shao-Lan Blum and Pooh Kaye directed “Captain”, the last of ten (!) pieces in the six o’clock program. The eight o’clock set of nine then opened with “The Last Martini”, Vicki Mendoza’s USC production. The local art was, in my mind, some of the best at the screening—no small feat, given the international entries and acclaim of the festival and the American aversion to supporting fringe art. (Dance for the camera is still fringe, right?) Blum’s red-sashed romp in “Captain”, like Where the Wild Things Are with invisible monsters, was especially delightful, and Mendoza’s editing in “The Last Martini” was among the most provocative and complex in the evening.
I have met some people, and I have seen some scene, and both speak to why I’m already loving this place.
LADB
As for Los Angeles films, there were two. Rae Shao-Lan Blum and Pooh Kaye directed “Captain”, the last of ten (!) pieces in the six o’clock program. The eight o’clock set of nine then opened with “The Last Martini”, Vicki Mendoza’s USC production. The local art was, in my mind, some of the best at the screening—no small feat, given the international entries and acclaim of the festival and the American aversion to supporting fringe art. (Dance for the camera is still fringe, right?) Blum’s red-sashed romp in “Captain”, like Where the Wild Things Are with invisible monsters, was especially delightful, and Mendoza’s editing in “The Last Martini” was among the most provocative and complex in the evening.
I have met some people, and I have seen some scene, and both speak to why I’m already loving this place.
LADB
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Hatched Indeed!
“Welcome to Los Angeles!” I love to hear that. To me, this city is brand spankin’ new. And speaking of brand new things, here’s to “HATCHED: An evening of brand new dances”.
What a venue. At 209 S. Garey Street downtown, in a district where warehouses galore are converting into sites for art, The Open Space pairs the flavor of the neighborhood with an impressive postmodern performance space. For “HATCHED,” the second story at 209 has been divided in two on the diagonal, giving the stage a corner where the white wall and the high, barred windows of the warehouse meet. The sound and lighting equipment is part of the balancing act, providing a quality stage without compromising the realities of the building. Manager Hassan Christopher has a real gem available for rent.
I was right to infer the Loyola Marymount University background of just about everyone involved. (This seemed to encompass the audience as well, present company and her pal excepted.) The program opened with a video piece that was Alaina Williams’ senior project there, and it handily introduced, in retrospect, the LMU aesthetic. “for your viewing pleasure” put Williams’ tidy physicality at the center of the screen, which itself was beautifully displayed on the white wall of The Open Space. The idea she introduced (verbally) was ownership of one’s body, and while it got a little lost in the collegiate stock of movements (here is a sequential turn, here is a pregnant skyward reach), the conclusion of an on-screen Williams manipulating? manipulated by? a long band of red cloth was a satisfying one. I’d love to see the video serve as a background to that solo; I’d also love to see more of Stephen Lee’s handiwork in video editing.
“Constrained Relieve” brought a trio of women to the floor, and while their steely expressions never matched the emotional pertinence of the stylized three’s-a-crowd partner shuffle, the precision of the dancing nearly made up for it. Both qualities must have been deliberate on the part of choreographer Stephanie Jamieson, but the reasons are beyond me. The qualities of The Open Space went woefully under-exercised, but again, these women are fierce movers. I take my recollection of more movement than music to mean that the piece set the bar high for the autonomy of the dancing.
Unfortunately, Diana Delcambre’s “For Yogi” missed that mark. The ode to the outdoorsy put a cast of six dancers in flannel, the live half fresh out of a tent, the filmed half in the great outdoors itself. The video made modern dance and a topical setting mesh by default, but the live performance never reached that point. Furthermore—and I’ll grant that quality dance with a laugh is tricky business—Delcambre set herself back when the voiceover of Jim Gaffigan’s stand-up took immediate comedic precedence.
My intermission cookie was delicious.
Alice MacDonald, the recent LMU graduate in charge of presenting “HATCHED,” faced the same funny dance challenge with “Out Fitted”. These movers are incredibly skilled, and the set design (an ambient closet of Goodwill pell-mell) was spot-on. But until MacDonald and her quintet decide why silly shoppers turn into trained movers and back again, and why only one only once struts through the proverbial fourth wall (third here), I’m not sure I buy it.
Evan Hart Marsh’s solo “Prana” was a nice change of pace once the Goodwill disappeared: movement for movement’s sake, meet primal expressivity. And dramatic lighting. And musculature. And dance that tells the music what to do, at least for a little while. Solid.
Finally, I love Maurice Ravel. I love “Blues Moderato”. I love the windows at The Open Space, whose black drapery finally came off for MacDonald’s “Frame of Reference” duet. I even love the way the LMU vocabulary was transposed to the ledges, the walls, the light from outside, and even that pesky corner! But I need to see a motive because, in the end, modern dance movement is weird. It’s not a social ceremony or an evolutionary tic, and enrapturing though every dancer was in “HATCHED”, it’s not an exercise in virtuosity. Motives seem to be the Achilles heel of dance in academia, and this performance wasn’t much of an exception.
Nevertheless, I applaud MacDonald’s hard work and her band of collaborators. “HATCHED” was a great beginning for a brand new Angelen(a), and worth all fifteen dollars.
Seventeen if you count the cookie.
LADB
What a venue. At 209 S. Garey Street downtown, in a district where warehouses galore are converting into sites for art, The Open Space pairs the flavor of the neighborhood with an impressive postmodern performance space. For “HATCHED,” the second story at 209 has been divided in two on the diagonal, giving the stage a corner where the white wall and the high, barred windows of the warehouse meet. The sound and lighting equipment is part of the balancing act, providing a quality stage without compromising the realities of the building. Manager Hassan Christopher has a real gem available for rent.
I was right to infer the Loyola Marymount University background of just about everyone involved. (This seemed to encompass the audience as well, present company and her pal excepted.) The program opened with a video piece that was Alaina Williams’ senior project there, and it handily introduced, in retrospect, the LMU aesthetic. “for your viewing pleasure” put Williams’ tidy physicality at the center of the screen, which itself was beautifully displayed on the white wall of The Open Space. The idea she introduced (verbally) was ownership of one’s body, and while it got a little lost in the collegiate stock of movements (here is a sequential turn, here is a pregnant skyward reach), the conclusion of an on-screen Williams manipulating? manipulated by? a long band of red cloth was a satisfying one. I’d love to see the video serve as a background to that solo; I’d also love to see more of Stephen Lee’s handiwork in video editing.
“Constrained Relieve” brought a trio of women to the floor, and while their steely expressions never matched the emotional pertinence of the stylized three’s-a-crowd partner shuffle, the precision of the dancing nearly made up for it. Both qualities must have been deliberate on the part of choreographer Stephanie Jamieson, but the reasons are beyond me. The qualities of The Open Space went woefully under-exercised, but again, these women are fierce movers. I take my recollection of more movement than music to mean that the piece set the bar high for the autonomy of the dancing.
Unfortunately, Diana Delcambre’s “For Yogi” missed that mark. The ode to the outdoorsy put a cast of six dancers in flannel, the live half fresh out of a tent, the filmed half in the great outdoors itself. The video made modern dance and a topical setting mesh by default, but the live performance never reached that point. Furthermore—and I’ll grant that quality dance with a laugh is tricky business—Delcambre set herself back when the voiceover of Jim Gaffigan’s stand-up took immediate comedic precedence.
My intermission cookie was delicious.
Alice MacDonald, the recent LMU graduate in charge of presenting “HATCHED,” faced the same funny dance challenge with “Out Fitted”. These movers are incredibly skilled, and the set design (an ambient closet of Goodwill pell-mell) was spot-on. But until MacDonald and her quintet decide why silly shoppers turn into trained movers and back again, and why only one only once struts through the proverbial fourth wall (third here), I’m not sure I buy it.
Evan Hart Marsh’s solo “Prana” was a nice change of pace once the Goodwill disappeared: movement for movement’s sake, meet primal expressivity. And dramatic lighting. And musculature. And dance that tells the music what to do, at least for a little while. Solid.
Finally, I love Maurice Ravel. I love “Blues Moderato”. I love the windows at The Open Space, whose black drapery finally came off for MacDonald’s “Frame of Reference” duet. I even love the way the LMU vocabulary was transposed to the ledges, the walls, the light from outside, and even that pesky corner! But I need to see a motive because, in the end, modern dance movement is weird. It’s not a social ceremony or an evolutionary tic, and enrapturing though every dancer was in “HATCHED”, it’s not an exercise in virtuosity. Motives seem to be the Achilles heel of dance in academia, and this performance wasn’t much of an exception.
Nevertheless, I applaud MacDonald’s hard work and her band of collaborators. “HATCHED” was a great beginning for a brand new Angelen(a), and worth all fifteen dollars.
Seventeen if you count the cookie.
LADB
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Testing, 5678
I've moved in, I've Googled, and I've found LA's dance scene to be as sprawling as its neighborhoods. But as an exercise in citizenship, I've decided to take it all in, think about it, and write accordingly.
The first brew on tap is this weekend's "HATCHED," a set of new works organized by Alice MacDonald and what seem to be a lot of Loyola Marymount University graduates. The Facebook event is linked, but in case you've managed to avoid that Internet monster, here's the info from it:
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Don’t miss the opportunity to join us at, Hatched: An evening of brand new dances, an inspirational summer performance!
Alice MacDonald presents Hatched: An evening of brand new dances. MacDonald brings together a diverse group of emerging choreographers, performers and artists to create evening presenting 5 new dance works. Hatched introduces an imaginative and diverse group of choreographers, Alice MacDonald, Stephanie Jamieson, Diana Delcambre and Evan Hart Marsh, exploring unique subject matter ranging from varying perspectives of the feminine psyche to a humorous twist on the presentation of character and a solo exploration of internal forces manifest as movement. In addition, live dance is incorporated with film in a work that explores the human relationship with nature. Hatched also features live music performance in dance by Marc Agostini and Mike Gallegos of The Eternal Return.
June 5th and 6th at 8pm, 2009.
For Ticket Reservations:
Email ajm2905@mac.com OR call (607) 262-0743
$15 Adults and $12 Students
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Can't wait.
LADB
The first brew on tap is this weekend's "HATCHED," a set of new works organized by Alice MacDonald and what seem to be a lot of Loyola Marymount University graduates. The Facebook event is linked, but in case you've managed to avoid that Internet monster, here's the info from it:
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Don’t miss the opportunity to join us at, Hatched: An evening of brand new dances, an inspirational summer performance!
Alice MacDonald presents Hatched: An evening of brand new dances. MacDonald brings together a diverse group of emerging choreographers, performers and artists to create evening presenting 5 new dance works. Hatched introduces an imaginative and diverse group of choreographers, Alice MacDonald, Stephanie Jamieson, Diana Delcambre and Evan Hart Marsh, exploring unique subject matter ranging from varying perspectives of the feminine psyche to a humorous twist on the presentation of character and a solo exploration of internal forces manifest as movement. In addition, live dance is incorporated with film in a work that explores the human relationship with nature. Hatched also features live music performance in dance by Marc Agostini and Mike Gallegos of The Eternal Return.
June 5th and 6th at 8pm, 2009.
For Ticket Reservations:
Email ajm2905@mac.com OR call (607) 262-0743
$15 Adults and $12 Students
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Can't wait.
LADB
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