Well, I continue to write - just not here. At the risk of sounding like I'm going for some tell-all blogging without the appropriate sense of irony, I say this: I am re-evaluating just how satisfied I am to write about LA dance and LA dance alone. So for now (clearly) I am taking a bit of a break (not from CultureSpot, just from this ranting site) to decide whether to make a more, oh, shall we say, liberal-arts-ish receptacle for my oft-overwhelming thoughts on, oh, whatever comes to mind.
What I'm trying to say is, it's not you, it's me.
Happy Valentine's Day!
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Snort, hack
I've been writing some. Just not much. Hello, Chicago! The Joffrey visits The Music Center, and Hubbard Street 2 comes to Pasadena. Locally, Mr. Perez has the birthday that never ends when an inspired tribute goes (went) up at Highways, featuring company members old and newest. (I will be missing this, thanks to excessive sniffles and a recent fever. Le sigh.) Third Street Dance is having a Haiti benefit class series tomorrow!, and then there's this.
No, let me emphasize: this. I can't decide whether to laugh. Ballet (which seems to have the same bipolar potential for ethereal beauty and laughable frivolity as does figure skating) has done plenty to botch cultural representations. Heavens. Just look at my beloved The Nutcracker. But in the Battle of Who Could Care Less (About Cultural Sensitivity), the skaters have won. I... I don't know what to say. And that's saying something.
No, let me emphasize: this. I can't decide whether to laugh. Ballet (which seems to have the same bipolar potential for ethereal beauty and laughable frivolity as does figure skating) has done plenty to botch cultural representations. Heavens. Just look at my beloved The Nutcracker. But in the Battle of Who Could Care Less (About Cultural Sensitivity), the skaters have won. I... I don't know what to say. And that's saying something.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Improvisation: Class v. Concert (Please)
An improvised dance is not a chaotic dance... or not necessarily a chaotic dance, anyway. Before you read this, pop on over to the neat-o Electric Lodge in sunny Venice. Classes are on the pricey end, performance tickets are $20 or so, but the LA Improv Dance Festival is a sample platter of exactly where improvisation is going, how, and - with some DIY introspect - why. Go ahead. Buy your tickets.
With quite a few instructors roaming around throughout the past few days (and today, and tomorrow), it seems that the festival really has managed to capture the various aspects of improvisational dance. Or, in the instance of the Platt Brothers, dance that hones the confused (but surely relevant) modern habit of artistic pastiche to make a tight, goofy, perceptive routine.
The performance varies per night, with certain pieces appearing twice and others disappearing into the relatively un-codified, un-choreographed ether of Improv Performance. Now here it is: the beef. Friday's performance began with "Music/Dance Collaboration," led by Jones Welsh and Will Salmon. (Reading Rainbow, anyone? Sorry, Will.) This isn't chaos! This! Is! Improv! But that doesn't make me like it. The disorganized visual mess of it was enough to narrow my eyes. The apparent gym-clothes-ambivalence toward presentation made me question the form's respect for its own appearance. Furthermore, the enormous ensemble was relentlessly un-cohering except in occasional imitations - which were, by their nature, reduced to triteness! Blast. Apart from a divine moment of duet between a trombone and a man in blue, I'd had quite enough of the sprawling class presentation almost as soon as it began.
Twisting the knife was that attitude. You know - the one of a happy and bewildered lower primate tinkering with some new contraption. It's a worthy and oft indispensable aspect of workshops and class time (hey, improv ain't easy!). I've had that attitude for a long time, given the right place for it. But once presentation time rolls around, I truly tire of the "what's this? Oh, it's an arm! My, look how it hinges!" attitude. That attitude. Ugh. Classroom time is process-of-discovery time. I'd like to watch performers who can present, rather than demonstrate.
Am I a traditionalist?
At any rate, after the first piece-ish thing ended and the glaze lifted from my eyes, the Platt brothers came on stage. Are any of them single? (Sorry, but I couldn't ask on CultureSpot.) They are hilarious. They are silly. They are the aforementioned YouTube-sensation-worthy trio that had, as far as I can tell, little to no improvisational work at all in their routine! So tightly arranged was the act that when I caught one of the brothers wiping sweat from his brow, for what can't have been a second, I thought "HEY! You messed it up!" Which is not to say that such disciplined comics don't belong in a dance festival. I'm just not sure how this one makes sense. But they perform tonight as well.
I'll replace my usual rant about the inanity of infantile playground-style panel-of-judges television and just say that these guys are well-noted.
Scott Wells! Who are you? The men of Scott Wells & Dancers have come down from San Francisco for the weekend, and stag. This follows the joking-but-not "(h)improv" coincidence of the all-male cast of dancemakers putting the festival up this year. "Call of the Wild" is a tightly scored, but still beautifully intuited, piece of dance. It's a little Ted Shawn & His Male Dancers (a troupe of men a few decades ago who helped make dance look red-blooded again), a little mockumentary style (stereotypical improv dance class words abound, deadpan), a little stunt show (WHY DOES EVERYONE SUDDENLY THINK IT'S OKAY TO CALL A CLASS EXERCISE A PERFORMANCE?), and a little... no, a lot profound. I will say that there are games obvious and subtle involved. I will also say that a wrestling mat and a Gobo lighting effect get involved. I will even say that all the men wear black pants. Even that tiny element of costume coordination brought everything together in a way that the "Music/Dance Collaboration" totally, erroneously, infuriatingly overlooked...
...as did the last piece, simply called "Dance Collaboration." Charlie Morrissey and the "iDFest Ensemble" closed out the Friday performance with the kind of activity I just can't shout in all-caps about again right now. I'll just leave it at that.
Likes: The trombone- and trumpet-players. The device (didn't mention it yet) of closing wings curtains to transition between sections. The Platt family genes. All but the trick show part of "Call of the Wild." Performances where the audience can chatter and buzz and react and feel totally all right about it.
Dislikes: Seeing a class when I came to see a concert. That monkey-with-a-new-toy carriage. The iPhone ring during the last piece.
And, hey. Go to the jam. If my calves ever recover from the jazz class I took with Danyol Jaye, I'll be there.
With quite a few instructors roaming around throughout the past few days (and today, and tomorrow), it seems that the festival really has managed to capture the various aspects of improvisational dance. Or, in the instance of the Platt Brothers, dance that hones the confused (but surely relevant) modern habit of artistic pastiche to make a tight, goofy, perceptive routine.
The performance varies per night, with certain pieces appearing twice and others disappearing into the relatively un-codified, un-choreographed ether of Improv Performance. Now here it is: the beef. Friday's performance began with "Music/Dance Collaboration," led by Jones Welsh and Will Salmon. (Reading Rainbow, anyone? Sorry, Will.) This isn't chaos! This! Is! Improv! But that doesn't make me like it. The disorganized visual mess of it was enough to narrow my eyes. The apparent gym-clothes-ambivalence toward presentation made me question the form's respect for its own appearance. Furthermore, the enormous ensemble was relentlessly un-cohering except in occasional imitations - which were, by their nature, reduced to triteness! Blast. Apart from a divine moment of duet between a trombone and a man in blue, I'd had quite enough of the sprawling class presentation almost as soon as it began.
Twisting the knife was that attitude. You know - the one of a happy and bewildered lower primate tinkering with some new contraption. It's a worthy and oft indispensable aspect of workshops and class time (hey, improv ain't easy!). I've had that attitude for a long time, given the right place for it. But once presentation time rolls around, I truly tire of the "what's this? Oh, it's an arm! My, look how it hinges!" attitude. That attitude. Ugh. Classroom time is process-of-discovery time. I'd like to watch performers who can present, rather than demonstrate.
Am I a traditionalist?
At any rate, after the first piece-ish thing ended and the glaze lifted from my eyes, the Platt brothers came on stage. Are any of them single? (Sorry, but I couldn't ask on CultureSpot.) They are hilarious. They are silly. They are the aforementioned YouTube-sensation-worthy trio that had, as far as I can tell, little to no improvisational work at all in their routine! So tightly arranged was the act that when I caught one of the brothers wiping sweat from his brow, for what can't have been a second, I thought "HEY! You messed it up!" Which is not to say that such disciplined comics don't belong in a dance festival. I'm just not sure how this one makes sense. But they perform tonight as well.
I'll replace my usual rant about the inanity of infantile playground-style panel-of-judges television and just say that these guys are well-noted.
Scott Wells! Who are you? The men of Scott Wells & Dancers have come down from San Francisco for the weekend, and stag. This follows the joking-but-not "(h)improv" coincidence of the all-male cast of dancemakers putting the festival up this year. "Call of the Wild" is a tightly scored, but still beautifully intuited, piece of dance. It's a little Ted Shawn & His Male Dancers (a troupe of men a few decades ago who helped make dance look red-blooded again), a little mockumentary style (stereotypical improv dance class words abound, deadpan), a little stunt show (WHY DOES EVERYONE SUDDENLY THINK IT'S OKAY TO CALL A CLASS EXERCISE A PERFORMANCE?), and a little... no, a lot profound. I will say that there are games obvious and subtle involved. I will also say that a wrestling mat and a Gobo lighting effect get involved. I will even say that all the men wear black pants. Even that tiny element of costume coordination brought everything together in a way that the "Music/Dance Collaboration" totally, erroneously, infuriatingly overlooked...
...as did the last piece, simply called "Dance Collaboration." Charlie Morrissey and the "iDFest Ensemble" closed out the Friday performance with the kind of activity I just can't shout in all-caps about again right now. I'll just leave it at that.
Likes: The trombone- and trumpet-players. The device (didn't mention it yet) of closing wings curtains to transition between sections. The Platt family genes. All but the trick show part of "Call of the Wild." Performances where the audience can chatter and buzz and react and feel totally all right about it.
Dislikes: Seeing a class when I came to see a concert. That monkey-with-a-new-toy carriage. The iPhone ring during the last piece.
And, hey. Go to the jam. If my calves ever recover from the jazz class I took with Danyol Jaye, I'll be there.
Monday, January 4, 2010
LA Ballet
Oh, and how could I forget! I reviewed the Los Angeles Ballet's production of "The Nutcracker," which was super. Forgot to copy and paste. Looking forward to their upcoming productions.
Holidays? Any of 'em?
Are there any more coming up? I recall an "In Case You Need an Excuse to Party" poster in my brother's room at home... but then, time flies. Turns out he's not 16 any more.
Happy new year!
The IDFest is coming up - take classes, see a show, help me decide when to attend. There's also word of a great Be-or-Bring-a-Beginner night at the LA/Santa Monica improv jam, and a viola? Played by someone? Next Sunday? I'll probably go, if I recover from last night. Turns out that stuff's not easy when you haven't done it for a while...
...other than that, I'm mostly just avoiding that public-funding-for-arts-education rant that's been sitting in my draft box. There's an Anatomy Riot coming up?
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas is over.
Happy new year!
The IDFest is coming up - take classes, see a show, help me decide when to attend. There's also word of a great Be-or-Bring-a-Beginner night at the LA/Santa Monica improv jam, and a viola? Played by someone? Next Sunday? I'll probably go, if I recover from last night. Turns out that stuff's not easy when you haven't done it for a while...
...other than that, I'm mostly just avoiding that public-funding-for-arts-education rant that's been sitting in my draft box. There's an Anatomy Riot coming up?
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas is over.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Whirlwinds that Smell Like Peppermint and Sound like Hootie and the Blowfish
Okay, so I don't like to fail. I also don't like to procrastinate, although according to Facebook I do.
But I am doing BOTH of those things by lazily linking you to the following: read about the dance year according to New York, buy tickets to one of the best Nutcracker performances EVER (I'll tell you why later, possibly from LAX and/or Dulles [if it's resurfaced]), and listen to Hootie and the Blowfish singing The Christmas Song (I'm obsessed).
By the time you're done with those things I might have finished my holler about public funding for the arts... which, as if it surprises anyone, was something I meant to finish days ago.
But I am doing BOTH of those things by lazily linking you to the following: read about the dance year according to New York, buy tickets to one of the best Nutcracker performances EVER (I'll tell you why later, possibly from LAX and/or Dulles [if it's resurfaced]), and listen to Hootie and the Blowfish singing The Christmas Song (I'm obsessed).
By the time you're done with those things I might have finished my holler about public funding for the arts... which, as if it surprises anyone, was something I meant to finish days ago.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Woof.
Well, that'll learn ya: don't eat really old bell peppers tossed in curry sauce before going out to swing dance. I'm sorry, Third Street Dance! I hope your party was a success. I'm glad you're helping critters out.
In a non-gastronomical update, congratulations are due to Show Box. After a good life at Metabolic Studio, the new home for DANCEbank classes is even more downtown! (I think the Colburn School owns the building? Not sure...) Also, the next Anatomy Riot is coming! And it's coming to that MiMoDa space I find so compelling. Perhaps I shall finally attend? The 2010 schedule is up somewhere for all of these things - I'll post it in a big ol' preview, which I keep telling myself I'll write before I go back east for a week.
Okay, so this was basically one long shout-out to Meg Wolfe. But ya gotta hand it to the woman. She gets things done.
Happy Wednesday!
In a non-gastronomical update, congratulations are due to Show Box. After a good life at Metabolic Studio, the new home for DANCEbank classes is even more downtown! (I think the Colburn School owns the building? Not sure...) Also, the next Anatomy Riot is coming! And it's coming to that MiMoDa space I find so compelling. Perhaps I shall finally attend? The 2010 schedule is up somewhere for all of these things - I'll post it in a big ol' preview, which I keep telling myself I'll write before I go back east for a week.
Okay, so this was basically one long shout-out to Meg Wolfe. But ya gotta hand it to the woman. She gets things done.
Happy Wednesday!
Sunday, December 13, 2009
LA Contemporary Dance Company Indeed
I can be a real procrastinator. Thank you, chock-full Internet. You devour my time! I am therefore a day and a half behind writing on the LA Contemporary Dance Company performance in the totally awesome Mimoda space on the west side. Called "Fight or Flight," the eye-level concert featured - features, since it's a two-weekender - work by Scott Hislop, Kate Hutter, and Adam Parson. Hey-o! Apparently Mr. Hislop is part of the finest moment of dance in at least somewhat recent high-schoolers-with-impossibly-cool-lives movie history. And I'm sold!, right?
Well, no. You see, I moved to Los Angeles for some pretty kooky reasons. High among them sits the fact that many a dance history textbook will follow a New York career in dancemaking until the human subject a. dies, b. goes off the deep end, or c. moves to the West Coast. The three seem equally fateful. I assure you they are not, but the most common response from my friends and co-dancers is "huh?" They moved to that other part of California to do wonderful things. I moved to La-La LAnd, and I can't even ironically link Perez Hilton.
I promise this is going somewhere.
I vacillate between denying the detached superficiality of this town and intellectualizing it. (I especially love car culture theories.) But superficiality is always there, and what drives me batty about "Fight or Flight" is not the lyrical alt-pop music. It is not the choreographed virtuosity for virtuosity's sake! And it's not even the thorough absence of any "Fight or Flight" themes at all in the products under the title. Nope, what maddeningly balances "Fight or Flight" between "hit" and "miss" is its absolute, and absolutely "LA," obliviousness.
Parson's "Initiator" projects photos of women around the globe, doing whatever it is those women do, onto a promisingly suggestive back drop of white sheets on a clothesline. The graceful and totally versatile women in the company enter the space. Baskets are shaken, hips are shaken, shapes are formed and dispersed. Potential becomes predictable: women spoon, women smile, women suffer, women bind together, women are women and isn't that nice and simple and pretty? If you're going for broke with cliches, go for broke. It can be done! But I tend to think (and really, why else would I write in public-ish?) that in another red-letter Year. of. Women's. Issues., it is nothing short of ignorant to make a non-committal piece of dance that openly suggests simplicity.
Maybe I'm being harsh. But whether Parson knew what he was doing is an unanswerable question! This is not to undermine his abilities as a dancer. "Initiator" constructs many beautiful, innovative, and moving (no more puns, I swear) moments out of very capable bodies. But deliberate portrayals of quote "womanhood" are very, very loaded, and should not be casual unless they're pointedly so. (If you're 18 or older and not in my family, Google coffee table book of my dreams "4 Inches".)
Parson is as indecisive as Los Angeles, and neither here nor there.
For every possibility of stealing my breath (like the shuffling feet of women from behind the clothesline set piece - they've become the bedsheets!) there is a moment to suggest that he had no idea he was stealing it. For example, the agony of social rejection is reduced to the aforementioned SYTYCD aesthetic. Hey. I love Imogen Heap as much as the next Manic Pixie Dream Girl. But more than that, I value my unique intelligence, my willingness to look past the television for dance, and the endlessly prismatic nuances of the too-often generalized sex to which my body committed itself. This first third of "Fight or Flight" (huh?) bared the internal conflict of non-street Los Angeles art to its scariest blind-spot potential. I'll probably be panicking in the blind spot for a while.
Hislop's "rEVOLUTION" annoyed me considerably less, and its costumes were some of the best I've seen in Los Angeles. Reverse corsetry gives the women massive hips and thighs, the men Hulk's bicep action. And I won't even wax redundant on casual heteronormative partnering, frontal performance, gesturing, or musical dependence. (To all I say, "plegh.") The dancers interact in ways formal and suggestive. It is a reflection, remnant of Petite Mort. Societal mores skew and dramatize the very basic elements (read: sex) of being a species.
The dancers are incredibly versatile and capable, carrying out even the most gasp-inducing leaps and poses with a sweaty, almost-casual elegance that I rarely, if ever, encounter in concert dance. But when the costumes are shed, the choreographic composure is, too. An informal hand-clasping line dance loses sight of the ballroom, and the basic black clothes (read: dance pants) hardly give Hislop's and Hutter's costuming expertise any credit. But I am curious about where Hislop can go if he tightens his focus, lets go of concert conventions, and pushes the envelope further on a few, or even just one, of the social structures he so obviously understands. "rEVOLUTION" side-steps, at least for its first half, the stereotypes of LA.
"I Ran" is Ms. Hutter's concert finale creation. It doesn't succumb to the blinders of "Initiator," but it doesn't observe like "rEVOLUTION." It has a resounding topical ADD: Televisions. Uniforms. Gender roles. Pantomime. Quaint, sweet gestures. Counting out loud. Pop music - ironic? frank?. I'm back in college! Help! Worse than that, I don't know what the flinging, sprawling style set on the dancers (who are great) is supposed to convey or accomplish.
I do know that it reflects the hyperactive, unaware, puppeteered, music-flung status of all the dances that anyone from the outside seems to see coming out of Los Angeles.
Tickets, if you want to debate with me.
Well, no. You see, I moved to Los Angeles for some pretty kooky reasons. High among them sits the fact that many a dance history textbook will follow a New York career in dancemaking until the human subject a. dies, b. goes off the deep end, or c. moves to the West Coast. The three seem equally fateful. I assure you they are not, but the most common response from my friends and co-dancers is "huh?" They moved to that other part of California to do wonderful things. I moved to La-La LAnd, and I can't even ironically link Perez Hilton.
I promise this is going somewhere.
I vacillate between denying the detached superficiality of this town and intellectualizing it. (I especially love car culture theories.) But superficiality is always there, and what drives me batty about "Fight or Flight" is not the lyrical alt-pop music. It is not the choreographed virtuosity for virtuosity's sake! And it's not even the thorough absence of any "Fight or Flight" themes at all in the products under the title. Nope, what maddeningly balances "Fight or Flight" between "hit" and "miss" is its absolute, and absolutely "LA," obliviousness.
Parson's "Initiator" projects photos of women around the globe, doing whatever it is those women do, onto a promisingly suggestive back drop of white sheets on a clothesline. The graceful and totally versatile women in the company enter the space. Baskets are shaken, hips are shaken, shapes are formed and dispersed. Potential becomes predictable: women spoon, women smile, women suffer, women bind together, women are women and isn't that nice and simple and pretty? If you're going for broke with cliches, go for broke. It can be done! But I tend to think (and really, why else would I write in public-ish?) that in another red-letter Year. of. Women's. Issues., it is nothing short of ignorant to make a non-committal piece of dance that openly suggests simplicity.
Maybe I'm being harsh. But whether Parson knew what he was doing is an unanswerable question! This is not to undermine his abilities as a dancer. "Initiator" constructs many beautiful, innovative, and moving (no more puns, I swear) moments out of very capable bodies. But deliberate portrayals of quote "womanhood" are very, very loaded, and should not be casual unless they're pointedly so. (If you're 18 or older and not in my family, Google coffee table book of my dreams "4 Inches".)
Parson is as indecisive as Los Angeles, and neither here nor there.
For every possibility of stealing my breath (like the shuffling feet of women from behind the clothesline set piece - they've become the bedsheets!) there is a moment to suggest that he had no idea he was stealing it. For example, the agony of social rejection is reduced to the aforementioned SYTYCD aesthetic. Hey. I love Imogen Heap as much as the next Manic Pixie Dream Girl. But more than that, I value my unique intelligence, my willingness to look past the television for dance, and the endlessly prismatic nuances of the too-often generalized sex to which my body committed itself. This first third of "Fight or Flight" (huh?) bared the internal conflict of non-street Los Angeles art to its scariest blind-spot potential. I'll probably be panicking in the blind spot for a while.
Hislop's "rEVOLUTION" annoyed me considerably less, and its costumes were some of the best I've seen in Los Angeles. Reverse corsetry gives the women massive hips and thighs, the men Hulk's bicep action. And I won't even wax redundant on casual heteronormative partnering, frontal performance, gesturing, or musical dependence. (To all I say, "plegh.") The dancers interact in ways formal and suggestive. It is a reflection, remnant of Petite Mort. Societal mores skew and dramatize the very basic elements (read: sex) of being a species.
The dancers are incredibly versatile and capable, carrying out even the most gasp-inducing leaps and poses with a sweaty, almost-casual elegance that I rarely, if ever, encounter in concert dance. But when the costumes are shed, the choreographic composure is, too. An informal hand-clasping line dance loses sight of the ballroom, and the basic black clothes (read: dance pants) hardly give Hislop's and Hutter's costuming expertise any credit. But I am curious about where Hislop can go if he tightens his focus, lets go of concert conventions, and pushes the envelope further on a few, or even just one, of the social structures he so obviously understands. "rEVOLUTION" side-steps, at least for its first half, the stereotypes of LA.
"I Ran" is Ms. Hutter's concert finale creation. It doesn't succumb to the blinders of "Initiator," but it doesn't observe like "rEVOLUTION." It has a resounding topical ADD: Televisions. Uniforms. Gender roles. Pantomime. Quaint, sweet gestures. Counting out loud. Pop music - ironic? frank?. I'm back in college! Help! Worse than that, I don't know what the flinging, sprawling style set on the dancers (who are great) is supposed to convey or accomplish.
I do know that it reflects the hyperactive, unaware, puppeteered, music-flung status of all the dances that anyone from the outside seems to see coming out of Los Angeles.
Tickets, if you want to debate with me.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Lucky Stumble
I am not a popper. I can pop!, but I don't quite make a narrative of it yet, going from Point A to Point B with an apparent plan. These people have an apparent plan.
At an anniversary party for a neighborhood boutique (without a website - but with that Cube t-shirt for sale!), a battle brought out pros and amateurs making tiny, rapidfire movements into a 21st-century meaning of Cool. I may have missed the local modern dance fare at Diavolo space yesterday, buuuuut... maybe this was better?
At an anniversary party for a neighborhood boutique (without a website - but with that Cube t-shirt for sale!), a battle brought out pros and amateurs making tiny, rapidfire movements into a 21st-century meaning of Cool. I may have missed the local modern dance fare at Diavolo space yesterday, buuuuut... maybe this was better?
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
What's Happening
There is so much to relay about dance. Where on earth have I been, besides eating my weight in Thanksgiving goodies? Better late than never, I suppose. There are the usual suspects: upcoming events (including a visitor on the 7th), a human interest story, a great cause, a piece of music that makes me wish I had a company to boss around. Less common, and more local, a happy belated birthday to Rudy Perez! And congratulations to Heidi Duckler and dear Leslie Seiters for their appearances in a new publication about site-specific dance. I'm looking forward to the next edition of Itch Dance Journal (and the one after that, when I'll actually mind the deadlines). Best of luck to the upcoming improv festival in LA, can't wait to swing dance at the Third Street Dance Holiday Party (scroll down one poster), and you'd better believe I'm getting my tickets to the LA Ballet Nutcracker.
Anybody else?
Anybody else?
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Swingin'
I went swing dancing! Well, sort of - one class and a brief open studio way out on the west side hardly count as a wild and crazy night of being led around the dance floor. But it was a perfectly happy little evening of good old-fashioned social dance. Warm up this way, add steps that way, and next thing you know you're either floating like a cloud around an engaging, loveable partner!, or you're having all your signals crossed by a man who can't count past six. Turns out you don't get much choice sometimes.
All right... so sue me. I have ideological misgivings about surrendering the basic structure of a dance to a man. But in a recent effort I've commissioned myself to, I present to you: the positive! (That's right. The positive.) The positive is that after a long and happy few years of always demanding at least equal share in a dance, it's a little bit freeing to just shuffle my feet and swivel around under the guise of chipper surrender. I had an unbeatable sense of my partner's baffled respect as, provided he could count past six, I made the most of every structural resource on the dance floor.
As I type, I am letting a Taylor Swift song poison my mind about how love works, and I'm wondering (as I imagine many, and wiser, wonderers have) if we created these structures for social interaction just to break them when the time comes, if the Lindy or the East Coast or whatever the heck I was doing to "All Shook Up" are just launch pads to acknowledging what really matters by giving it a boundless free-for-all boogie. Is freedom from structure... transcendent?
(Answer me, Taylor!)
But I digress, and my day job beckons. Happy dancing.
All right... so sue me. I have ideological misgivings about surrendering the basic structure of a dance to a man. But in a recent effort I've commissioned myself to, I present to you: the positive! (That's right. The positive.) The positive is that after a long and happy few years of always demanding at least equal share in a dance, it's a little bit freeing to just shuffle my feet and swivel around under the guise of chipper surrender. I had an unbeatable sense of my partner's baffled respect as, provided he could count past six, I made the most of every structural resource on the dance floor.
As I type, I am letting a Taylor Swift song poison my mind about how love works, and I'm wondering (as I imagine many, and wiser, wonderers have) if we created these structures for social interaction just to break them when the time comes, if the Lindy or the East Coast or whatever the heck I was doing to "All Shook Up" are just launch pads to acknowledging what really matters by giving it a boundless free-for-all boogie. Is freedom from structure... transcendent?
(Answer me, Taylor!)
But I digress, and my day job beckons. Happy dancing.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Flash! A mob!
What just happened? Did I just meet up with hundreds (right?) of strangers in LA (aah, city) and bust out Janet Jackson moves in a flash mob? Why, yes. Yes I did. And it looked like this the second time:
Staci Lawrence and Conroe Brooks put their production experience and general enthusiasm (it's infectious) to the test, gaining participants from friends, family, Facebook, Twitter, and Miss Jackson's (if you're nasty) website, then having the whole lot of 'em stepping in time to a medley of the superstar's hits.
Sadly, the much-Twittered Janet appearance overshadowed the "flash" part in Round 2 (hence the aisle). Flash Mobs can be pillow fights, hug-fests... anything; in a manner somewhat typical of LA, this one served consumer culture. But hey, the first round surprised glassy-eyed Grove shoppers into unexpected delight!
What a bizarre experience. "It's really about promoting that viral grassroots side of it," Staci pointed out. And this is true: I am utterly impressed with the range of dancers, from skinny to not-skinny and tall to short, old to young and in between, obviously and sneakily devoted to Jackson. (After learning my intentions to ponder and write, one participant asked me outright: do you like Janet Jackson? I do.) The "let's just do it" attitude of the whirlwind orchestration says quite a bit about embracing spontaneity. (Cheese!) Furthermore, I've never felt so connected to so many people in this weird car-obsessed land of group solitude.
I'm disgruntled that this was, by definition, a promotion (see the tab here). But if a comedian and a singer in the TV-and-movie industry can just say "hey, let's do this" and really do it? Well, then I have no doubt that they'll keep doing this for simpler things - even better than Janet's Number Ones album.
Happy dancing!
Staci Lawrence and Conroe Brooks put their production experience and general enthusiasm (it's infectious) to the test, gaining participants from friends, family, Facebook, Twitter, and Miss Jackson's (if you're nasty) website, then having the whole lot of 'em stepping in time to a medley of the superstar's hits.
Sadly, the much-Twittered Janet appearance overshadowed the "flash" part in Round 2 (hence the aisle). Flash Mobs can be pillow fights, hug-fests... anything; in a manner somewhat typical of LA, this one served consumer culture. But hey, the first round surprised glassy-eyed Grove shoppers into unexpected delight!
What a bizarre experience. "It's really about promoting that viral grassroots side of it," Staci pointed out. And this is true: I am utterly impressed with the range of dancers, from skinny to not-skinny and tall to short, old to young and in between, obviously and sneakily devoted to Jackson. (After learning my intentions to ponder and write, one participant asked me outright: do you like Janet Jackson? I do.) The "let's just do it" attitude of the whirlwind orchestration says quite a bit about embracing spontaneity. (Cheese!) Furthermore, I've never felt so connected to so many people in this weird car-obsessed land of group solitude.
I'm disgruntled that this was, by definition, a promotion (see the tab here). But if a comedian and a singer in the TV-and-movie industry can just say "hey, let's do this" and really do it? Well, then I have no doubt that they'll keep doing this for simpler things - even better than Janet's Number Ones album.
Happy dancing!
Friday, November 13, 2009
It's Happening!
Fact: I dislike extensive program notes. I think they mute the dance. The dance should speak for itself. Down with program notes!
Now that that's out of the way, let me praise every other aspect of "Once More, Again, One," Hana van der Kolk's latest creation at Five Thirty Three. I'd been feeling a little gipped after parades & changes, replays came to REDCAT this week, as if by missing the 1960's I'd missed having my mind blown by the first run of anything.
Wrong!
With or without all the rhetoric in the program notes (which I still refuse to read), "Once More, Again, One" is part is-this-art?, part Warhol happening, and all 2009. I'm not even totally sure when the program began, although it certainly picked up when David Kendall (not the VJ) spun a song out of sounds coming from the four dancers. The performance elements are just super. (Gush!) There are solos, duos, and Lucinda Childs-ish floor patterns, not to mention enough Prince to tide me over 'til next 1999. There's stripping down and zoning out and a creepy a capella Madonna cover! But I'd rather you attend this gem of a show than read what's in it. Heck, skip parades & changes, replays. You'll be learning more about postmodern art if you see it at Five Thirty Three. It's a grungy loft two meaningfully scary blocks away from the terrain of the Downtown Art Walk. Through the former factory windows you can see a "This Is My - OUR - Town" Dodgers billboard with good ol' Villaraigosa beaming. Make what you will of that.
I am a little wary of van der Kolk's Master's Degree. The institution says a lot about dance's recent history. To slug through tuition and academic red tape in order to make warehouse art... If you ask me, it's a paradox. It's undeniably networking-friendly, and preservative to say the least, but seems to counter by its very nature how we stick it to the man. (Can we anymore?)
But hey, I'd have had not a clue of the card-carryin' dancemaker's background if I hadn't asked before the show! So shame on me.
I am thoroughly impressed and relieved to know that my generation can escape sweepstakes and YouTube (awesome though the two may be).
Now please scrap your evening plans, scrap what you learned about what dance should be, and see this performance.
Now that that's out of the way, let me praise every other aspect of "Once More, Again, One," Hana van der Kolk's latest creation at Five Thirty Three. I'd been feeling a little gipped after parades & changes, replays came to REDCAT this week, as if by missing the 1960's I'd missed having my mind blown by the first run of anything.
Wrong!
With or without all the rhetoric in the program notes (which I still refuse to read), "Once More, Again, One" is part is-this-art?, part Warhol happening, and all 2009. I'm not even totally sure when the program began, although it certainly picked up when David Kendall (not the VJ) spun a song out of sounds coming from the four dancers. The performance elements are just super. (Gush!) There are solos, duos, and Lucinda Childs-ish floor patterns, not to mention enough Prince to tide me over 'til next 1999. There's stripping down and zoning out and a creepy a capella Madonna cover! But I'd rather you attend this gem of a show than read what's in it. Heck, skip parades & changes, replays. You'll be learning more about postmodern art if you see it at Five Thirty Three. It's a grungy loft two meaningfully scary blocks away from the terrain of the Downtown Art Walk. Through the former factory windows you can see a "This Is My - OUR - Town" Dodgers billboard with good ol' Villaraigosa beaming. Make what you will of that.
I am a little wary of van der Kolk's Master's Degree. The institution says a lot about dance's recent history. To slug through tuition and academic red tape in order to make warehouse art... If you ask me, it's a paradox. It's undeniably networking-friendly, and preservative to say the least, but seems to counter by its very nature how we stick it to the man. (Can we anymore?)
But hey, I'd have had not a clue of the card-carryin' dancemaker's background if I hadn't asked before the show! So shame on me.
I am thoroughly impressed and relieved to know that my generation can escape sweepstakes and YouTube (awesome though the two may be).
Now please scrap your evening plans, scrap what you learned about what dance should be, and see this performance.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
parades & changes, replays (& replays & replays & replays & replays...)
Every so often I see a dance and I feel I've been given the finger. Well, hi! Anna Halprin, mother of the Planetary Dance and the happy holistic practice of movement arts for one's quality of life, you have put me in my place. I'm not particularly impressed with "parades & changes, replays," nor am I inclined to read the laborious program notes explaining the 1964 original of the 2008 recreation. I am inclined to give you, my darling reader, a play by play. Even if you read it, you'll probably be all right seeing it too.
The white noise of crowd uncontrol hums out of the speakers when a kindly man in a suit takes the stage, presumably for the standard off-with-the-cell-phones chide. Instead he conducts, and dancers sneakily seated rise and speak in French and English and who knows what else about... well, anything? Once they reach the stage, what I will call Part I is already off to a wily start. Off with the suits! On with the suits. Off with the suits again! And so on. Next thing you know there's a brown paper waterfall and a celibate orgy center stage, then the back wall opens and off they all glide, clad in wads of the waterfall. End Part I.
Jerome Delatour
In Part II, the lights are brighter and the composed, near-smirk faces are wilier, and everyone is probably more aware of my formalist eyes bugging out in the back row of the theater. (Will I ever be on time to anything?) A brief flash of Stomp later, the stage becomes aisles of 21st-century-junk-kitsch piles. This I'd been anticipating. The dancers mosey and don wacky costumes. They put wacky costumes on each other!
Jerome Delatour
There is not one pirouette, not one leap or gesture that suggests this came from a classroom. (Although, minor gripe, a few moments feel like a college class learning to make improv scores.) Generally the dance is just... there. Production value be damned, since a huge white balloon lit from the inside and a live musical score are about as complex as things get. As two critters wander out of the theater, having gone from suited to naked to suited to naked to dressed in colorful trash, I wish LA had more pedestrian traffic. It's a little bleak to see two such laissez fair art bodies wander out into the street to find... nothing.
The white noise of crowd uncontrol hums out of the speakers when a kindly man in a suit takes the stage, presumably for the standard off-with-the-cell-phones chide. Instead he conducts, and dancers sneakily seated rise and speak in French and English and who knows what else about... well, anything? Once they reach the stage, what I will call Part I is already off to a wily start. Off with the suits! On with the suits. Off with the suits again! And so on. Next thing you know there's a brown paper waterfall and a celibate orgy center stage, then the back wall opens and off they all glide, clad in wads of the waterfall. End Part I.
Jerome Delatour
In Part II, the lights are brighter and the composed, near-smirk faces are wilier, and everyone is probably more aware of my formalist eyes bugging out in the back row of the theater. (Will I ever be on time to anything?) A brief flash of Stomp later, the stage becomes aisles of 21st-century-junk-kitsch piles. This I'd been anticipating. The dancers mosey and don wacky costumes. They put wacky costumes on each other!
Jerome Delatour
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Dense Thoughts
A few thoughts with erratic-at-best parenthetical citations:
I'm often asked how dance is preserved, then an hour later finding myself still rattling on about Labanotation. (Think of it, simply, as music notation where bodies become sounds that take up time and space.) Despite the thorough work of this written system - even the basics are meticulous - there is a debate within the dance community as to whether the pen can truly record and convey the dance. This is understandable: live concert dance, as any basic art theorist can shrug and mumble about, is ethereal, ethereal, and ethereal. But the dichotomy between dancers and notators is selfish, and far from self-serving; indeed, it makes for a bleak future at best in written dance preservation.
In Arthur Lubow's "Can Modern Dance Be Preserved?" (New York Times, 5 November 2009) the postmodern dances of the late Merce Cunningham receive especial attention. The old age and ailing health of the renowned choreographer sparked a quick plan to preserve his work - one that seemed counterintuitive at best. Cunningham's famous words suddenly spoke volumes to both the value and the preservational carelessness of his art:
Further problems arise with the infrastructure of most modern dance companies (inseparable choreographer and company), and with the teaching of dance "primarily from one dancer to another, 'body to body'" (Lubow). The alternative method - one taken by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, for instance - is to adopt new works into a repertoire, honoring gestalt over byline. (This of course presents its own problem, perhaps another issue entirely: with one choreographer or ten, artistic attitudes may be as nebulous as trends in the arts or as heavy as Martha Graham's heart. [In the case of Cunningham, chance and indeterminacy put an already abstracted process through a kaleidoscope.]) But in a single choreographer's work, for one company or otherwise, there must be a compromise. I am not convinced that preserving teh dance and honoring the dancemaker are mutually exclusive endeavors.
Lubow refers to the common reliance upon videotaping, the notion that it captures movement and presentation, if incompletely. But performances are not exact, and intentionally or not, Dick Caples (witty and wise Lar Lubovitch Dance Company's executive director) articulates exactly how choreographers hinder their own preservation when they fail to engage notators. "'No choreographer I know can do (Labanotation),'" he says, "'They don't trust giving it over to someone and saying "I can't check on you, but I am going to trust you"'" (Lubow).
A risk is already being taken when a choreographer places movement in the proverbial hands - the literal, risky bodies - of dancers. I accept the artistic distrust of a stranger fitting elaborate thoughts into columns, but there is no rule that this notator be a stranger. What if dancers could preserve their own steps? What if learning to dance and notate were the same as learning to speak and write? Without this dual endeavor, dance culture is making itself one of orators and no written language.
The "dance capsules" in the Cunningham trust are progressive, containing everything from choreographer's notes to pictures of stagecraft to videotapes and dancers' advice (Lubow). Leave it to the theorists to decide whether this threatens the fresh choreographic approaches that made work in the first place - now it's the responsibility of the recreator, a legacy left to the able and willing artists who can reinvent Cunningham indefinitely.
I'm often asked how dance is preserved, then an hour later finding myself still rattling on about Labanotation. (Think of it, simply, as music notation where bodies become sounds that take up time and space.) Despite the thorough work of this written system - even the basics are meticulous - there is a debate within the dance community as to whether the pen can truly record and convey the dance. This is understandable: live concert dance, as any basic art theorist can shrug and mumble about, is ethereal, ethereal, and ethereal. But the dichotomy between dancers and notators is selfish, and far from self-serving; indeed, it makes for a bleak future at best in written dance preservation.
In Arthur Lubow's "Can Modern Dance Be Preserved?" (New York Times, 5 November 2009) the postmodern dances of the late Merce Cunningham receive especial attention. The old age and ailing health of the renowned choreographer sparked a quick plan to preserve his work - one that seemed counterintuitive at best. Cunningham's famous words suddenly spoke volumes to both the value and the preservational carelessness of his art:
Dance gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.If this is not carelessness, it is at least occupational hazard. As Lubow points out, Cunningham freed dance from dictatorial music, "charged it inventively with the chaotic overflow and technological buzz of contemporary life" (Lubow). These two steps (so to speak) both set his works apart from the dance canon prior and made it nearly impossibly difficult to recreate without the maker at the helm. One could argue that for all the details of a notation score there are infinitely more nuances in Cunningham dances, works that convert pure feeling into pure presentation.
Further problems arise with the infrastructure of most modern dance companies (inseparable choreographer and company), and with the teaching of dance "primarily from one dancer to another, 'body to body'" (Lubow). The alternative method - one taken by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, for instance - is to adopt new works into a repertoire, honoring gestalt over byline. (This of course presents its own problem, perhaps another issue entirely: with one choreographer or ten, artistic attitudes may be as nebulous as trends in the arts or as heavy as Martha Graham's heart. [In the case of Cunningham, chance and indeterminacy put an already abstracted process through a kaleidoscope.]) But in a single choreographer's work, for one company or otherwise, there must be a compromise. I am not convinced that preserving teh dance and honoring the dancemaker are mutually exclusive endeavors.
Lubow refers to the common reliance upon videotaping, the notion that it captures movement and presentation, if incompletely. But performances are not exact, and intentionally or not, Dick Caples (witty and wise Lar Lubovitch Dance Company's executive director) articulates exactly how choreographers hinder their own preservation when they fail to engage notators. "'No choreographer I know can do (Labanotation),'" he says, "'They don't trust giving it over to someone and saying "I can't check on you, but I am going to trust you"'" (Lubow).
A risk is already being taken when a choreographer places movement in the proverbial hands - the literal, risky bodies - of dancers. I accept the artistic distrust of a stranger fitting elaborate thoughts into columns, but there is no rule that this notator be a stranger. What if dancers could preserve their own steps? What if learning to dance and notate were the same as learning to speak and write? Without this dual endeavor, dance culture is making itself one of orators and no written language.
The "dance capsules" in the Cunningham trust are progressive, containing everything from choreographer's notes to pictures of stagecraft to videotapes and dancers' advice (Lubow). Leave it to the theorists to decide whether this threatens the fresh choreographic approaches that made work in the first place - now it's the responsibility of the recreator, a legacy left to the able and willing artists who can reinvent Cunningham indefinitely.
It is painful to consider that a life’s work will disappear, but it is also hard to think that it will be diminished by inexact performances, as fuzzy as fourth-generation photocopies. In establishing the trust and endorsing the extinction of the foundation, Cunningham seemed to be creating a structure as intelligent and farsighted as a Cunningham dance. But as any of his dancers will tell you, his steps are fiendishly difficult to carry out.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Saturday, November 7, 2009
cheating.
I apologize for the basic copy-and-paste (see below) from what'll be on Culture Spot tomorrow. I am very, very tired and took "To Be Straight With You" very much to heart - where I will keep it 'til thoughts thereof become conversational. If you see the performance, please tell me what you think. Good night!
DV8 Physical Theatre
It is an art to express oneself, calibrating instinct with expectations and behavioral parameters.
It is an art to project a sphere of blue and green Earth out of thin air and spin it at a dancer’s fingertips.
It is an art to let an audience forget about “dance” or “performance” and instead submerge it in a vision so thorough, so absolutely clear-sighted that town hall meeting, support group, feature film, and personal journal meld into each other and onto the stage. It is this art that makes DV8 Physical Theatre so much greater than the sum of its parts. At another west coast premiere in Royce Hall, UCLA Live presented the English troupe and its latest work, “To Be Straight With You,” on Friday night.
Every word comes from an interview conducted to create the piece. Sentimentality is left at the door for eighty minutes of movement, stories, facts, meticulous lighting and sound, and costumes as subtle as the DV8 craft itself. What remains is the raw nerve of cultural shame. Part of this is beyond native comprehension: there is a sense of post-colonial guilt, a confused responsibility that belongs uniquely to the English heritage. Men and women must flee to England for refuge from blind atrocities in Nigeria, or from families in India that will not accept homosexuality the way London will.
But “To Be Straight With You” does not make generalities. Instead, facts are acknowledged as the force of so many individuals’ suffering for their sexuality. The 85 countries lit in red beneath a dancer’s hands criminalize, to varying degrees, homosexual relations, and regional prejudices create the private narratives of each vignette. Two women are drawn – literally, by lighting on a scrim – farther and farther from each other as their culture denies them a relationship. An Iraqi doctor relates his devastating story in clinical tones, even as unidentifiable men batter and drag him across the stage. In a passage of the finest staging, classical Indian dancing to pop music helps ease the tragedy of suppression in arranged marriage. One woman revels in her newfound freedom from stringent religion.
Many ask for anonymity outright: their families will find them, or their neighbors will assault them.
For every moment of heart-wrenching fact, there is a moment of physical mastery. The DV8 dancers have precision command over every sinew. Some of the most effective monologues are delivered from bodies seeming possessed, with shaking legs or expressing every single word in an arm, an elbow, a neck. In one awe-striking blink, two men sitting in chairs become two men standing on chairs.
With chairs and scrims and moving sets, the stagecraft in “To Be Straight With You” is integrated so that one might overlook its complexity. Lights find their subject to the thread; sound obeys staging completely. Projection, the bane of graceful tech in dance, seems prepared as its own exhibit. It is a startling complement to what it accompanies. A mobile room becomes DJ booth, living room, or prison cell, and there is a chalkboard on the stage filled with scrawl, the chaos of a world that has thousands of words to describe its own fear of, well, deviation.
The glue of the piece is the tone of Lloyd Newson. When he established DV8 and his artistic directorship in 1986, Newson cast aside the pursuit of abstraction in dance. What results is so closely integrated with its performance and production elements, from monologue to follow spot, that the company truly embodies its “Physical Theatre” moniker. Best of all, there remain the unconventional – or, as with masks, hyperconventional – signatures of the troupe behind “Strange Fish” and “The Cost of Living.” It is direction so well-developed that performance disappears altogether, allowing us to observe our own.
DV8 Physical Theatre will present “To Be Straight With You” again at 8 on Saturday, November 6 in Royce Hall at UCLA. For more information or to order tickets, visit uclalive.org.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Dance Around Town
(I don't understand why my font changed!)
One embarrassingly long hiatus later, I'm back - and the calendar's exploding! Whoops. So here you have a preview/plug for at least halfway trustworthy dance performances, classes, and events (and a performance art piece or two) coming up around Los Angeles. Sorted by date, this should help satisfy your hankerin' for local AND exotic fare for at least half the month. Tie on your tennies (or your ballet flats or your bare feet) and get across town to...
...Tonight (November 4) at 8:30 - "Dancing on Site and on Camera" brings three award-winning choreographers to chat about their work (the how's, the why's) with Alpert Awards director Irene Borger. The event is at REDCAT and co-presented by Dance Camera West.
...November 5 at 12:00 - Kasey McMahon and Emmeline Chang will be dotting now 'til early 2010 with performance art events. In Century City, Help Your Husband Get Ahead is the first. There's a Facebook event up - RSVP if you're performing, and you'll get the full dig on how to be! Or just find yourself at Avenue of the Stars Office Park around lunch time...
...November 5 at 7:30 & November 8 at 3:00 - At the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, Lineage Dance will perform in the Art & Ideas Festival: ORIGINS. It's the brainchild, if you will, of artistic director Hilary Thomas. For tickets, check out the company site or the Art & Ideas one. To learn more, click here! They're a pretty super charity-driven group with dances worth seeing.
...November 6 & 7 at 8:00 - UCLA Live actually seems to have planned their Dance and Spoken Word series around my interests. DV8 Physical Theater is coming to town! Lloyd Newson, consistent purveyor of what no one will talk about enough, is bringing To Be Straight With You to Royce Hall for its cross-disciplinarily envelope-pushin' west coast premiere. I am actually drooling.
...November 6 from 10:00 AM 'til 5:00 PM - As if the weekend could get any better, DV8 is holding open auditions. (Also at Royce Hall - and really, open. Men, women, whoever. Click here.)
...November 6 & 7 at 8:30 PM, November 8 at 3:00 PM - My beloved bumpkin college made me a big fan of gamelan music. That and Balinese dance make Ramayana: An Indian Epic at REDCAT. I don't know the first thing about the performance ensemble, but it looks promising!
...November 6 & 7 at 8:00 PM, November 8 at 6:00 PM - Who knows...
...November 7, 14, & 21 at 11:00 AM's - Neil Greenberg will be teaching at DANCEbank, that steady sturdy stream of dance classes for all at Farm Lab heading out of downtown. Classes are $12 apiece. And, because I think this map from the Facebook group is just so great:
...November 7 at 7:00 - I love this company's website. I dig their origin. I don't like that (for shame!) I've never actually seen them perform. Maybe I'll make it to this! And then maybe I'll make it to this. I can't vouch for it yet... but I'm excited.
...November 8 at 7:30 - Yvonne Rainer, that glorious dancemaker who changed SO so so much in the art (Wiki her) is getting more well-deserved attention with Part 2 of 8 in "Bodies, Objects, Films: An Yvonne Rainer Retrospective." The Egyptian Theater in Hollywood is showing "Film about a woman who...", which Ms. Rainer made in 1974. Parking's near-free with validation; general admission is $10. Check it out.
...November 11-14 at 8:30 PM - Another glorious dancemaker, Anna Halprin, will actually outlive us all. But slightly separate from her holistic and apparently life-elongating dances, parades and changes was as awe- and grumble-inducing a piece of postmodernism as any when it premiered in 1965. Who knows how it'll look among 21st century art confetti? I don't. I'm curious. Will review, if tickets appear... But beware, social conservatives! Like all good art, it was once banned in the US. Features a cast of modern scene all-stars, in case you're curious.
...November 14, who knows when, who knows where - FLASH MOB JANET JACKSON DANCE. Will update.
...November 15, 6:30 - 9:00 PM - Word to my home crew! Okay... forget I said that. But a kernel of cool cats meets every week at 522 Santa Monica Blvd. in the coast town for a Contact Improv jam. (My first LA dance experience.) Better than that (as if it could be), they have a Be Or Bring a Beginner night every month! I think it's on the 15th this month. Sorry if I'm wrong... But hey, pay $7-or-what-you-can-pay and get play time with a group of considerable skill and variety. And even if there's no official class, folks are there to help you learn. Plus you might luck out and land a Swinger's milkshake date with the whole party! I recommend. In case they ever update their site: here.
Okay. Gotta stop. Too much to do.
Love,
LADB
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
