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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.