[This ran in the L.A. Times.] Thirty-plus years after founding La La La Human Steps, Montreal-based choreographer-director Édouard Lock has become a sort of philosopher-king for the fierce and intelligent abstract dance made popular in the 1980s. While other members of that chic choreographic wave (Bill T. Jones, Karole Armitage) have since … [Read more...]
My Lunch with a Billion-Dollar Tour Director
[This article originally ran in the LA Times.] In a dark booth at the Polo Lounge, just down the street from his Beverly Hills home, tour director extraordinaire Jamie King struggles to recall the day he hung up his dance shoes for good. Though his management badly wants this interview to stay on the topic of his current feats as the … [Read more...]
Bring it On!
[This piece first ran in the Los Angeles Times.] At the pre-show warm-up for "Bring It On: The Musical," performers in their 20s are stretching and assuming yoga postures, others are jumping rope or jogging softly in place. It's what you might expect from any cast of a musical. Then suddenly, downstage right, there's a complicated, unfamiliar … [Read more...]
Hofesh Shechter’s “Political Mother”
[This piece originally ran in the L.A. Times.] In a week of dramatic Mideast news, including the release of Sgt. 1st Class Gilad Shalit and the death of deposed Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, Royce Hall audiences who caught the United States premiere of Israeli-born choreographer/composer Hofesh Shechter’s “Political Mother” traveled beyond these … [Read more...]
Ho-Hum “Footloose”
[This piece initially ran in the Los Angeles Times.] By one measure, director Craig Brewer’s 2011 restraint and careful focus in the retelling of “Footloose” appear a success for Paramount, and a boon for the propulsion of American dance. With heralded performances by its young leads and critical appreciation of its punched-up energy, Brewer’s … [Read more...]
Alvin Ailey on 24-City Tour
How to institutionalize the extraordinary? There is a lesson to be learned from the amazing success and vitality of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, now in its 53rd year. Their current tour is packed with choreography to inspire and dancers to full-on worship. I reviewed Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for the Seattle Times. The next … [Read more...]
Billy Elliot in Spades
The film “Billy Elliot” is a masterpiece of storytelling economy. Alongside its most famous thread — a young boy’s discovery of ballet — Lee Hall portrayed the impotent rage of a redundant working-class population (it’s set during the year-long strike of the British National Union of Mineworkers), the insularity and conformity of small-town England … [Read more...]
Benjamin Millepied talks Dance on Film
[this piece originally ran in the L.A. Times] Dancer Benjamin Millepied, 33, comes off as a bit of a highbrow pawn in "Black Swan," Darren Aronofsky's award-winning ballet-horror film. One imagines his character's pale hands, lifting Natalie Portman, as dull and mean and clammy. Off-screen, however, Millepied has the world in a wide, warm embrace. … [Read more...]
The Consolation of Concert Dance
After the multiplying images of Japan’s natural disasters of the last week-plus, is there any way to ram some sort of grounding stick into place? In this glass-walled age where one nation’s disaster is seen and felt by people around the world, how does the imagistic snowball ever stop rolling? How does one hold tragedy’s drowning force and time’s … [Read more...]
Behind the Scenes at Hanson’s Revolution
"Gloria’s Cause" is choreographer Danya Hanson’s first full-bodied ensemble piece since her 33 Fainting Spells days, and she has packed it more fully, and dug more deeply, than anything she’s done before. If her early works with Gaelen Hanson were like dense short stories, and her later works with Hanson, Peggy Piacenza, and Linus Phillips were … [Read more...]