Matthew Bourne’s 'Swan Lake,' filmed in 3-D, one night only

There is much to anticipate from this spring’s exciting roster of live and pre-recorded international ballet concerts showing in area cinemas -- including a handful of performances by Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet and London’s Royal Ballet. But nothing quite pumps the adrenaline like the quiet news that there’ll be a one-night-only cinema rebroadcast Tuesday of Matthew Bourne’s fantastic, male-driven 1995 re-envisioning of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.”  

Bourne is said to be pleased with this 3-D film, starring principal dancers Richard Winsor and Nina Goldman, which was recorded at Sadler’s Wells in 2011.  Cast with threatening male swans, the high-intensity ballet (glimpsed at the end of the film “Billy Elliot”) features camerawork shot from above and below that is said to capture and enhance stage patterns, momentum and the ballet's menacing tone.

Of all the “Swan Lake” offerings turned out recently to satisfy the excited thirst for balletic drama created by Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan,” this one is surely the favorite to satisfy. Twelve Southland theaters will be screening it. 

 7:30 p.m. Tuesday: Matthew Bourne's "Swan Lake" at Rave 18 with Imax (Los Angeles), Burbank 16 with IMAX (Burbank), Del Amo with IMAX (Torrance), Ontario Mills 30 (Ontario), Orange 30 with IMAX (Orange), Citywalk Stadium 19 with IMAX (Universal City), Cinemark 22 with IMAX (Lancaster), Cinemark 14 (Long Beach), Orange Stadium Promenade 25 (Orange), Huntington Beach 20 (Huntington Beach), Ventura Stadium 16 (Ventura), Irvine Spectrum 20 with IMAX (Irvine). Tickets are available at participating theater box offices and online at www.FathomEvents.com.

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Bolshoi and London Ballets, coming to a theater near you

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Mike Daisey, the theater artist behind the headlines

-- Jean Lenihan

Photo: Richard Winsor in Matthew Bourne's "Swan Lake." Credit: From NCM Media Networks.

 

Bolshoi and London ballets coming to a movie screen near you

Ballet lovers who haven’t yet seized the opportunity to experience the enhanced view of detail and artistic interpretation inherent in cinema-casts have a slate of interesting opportunities from London and Moscow this spring, plus an even larger roster down the road.

Similarly to Metropolitan Opera and National Theatre cinema-casts, performances are first seen live, via satellite, and with repeat screenings.

Emerging Pictures co-founder Barry Rebo, whose company presents the ballets, said his audiences have been steadily growing "week by week, show by show" this year, with an overall 35% rise in ticket sales for combined ballet and opera offerings across the U.S. and Canada.

Numbers spiked noticeably when David Hallberg performed live with the Bolshoi Ballet in November, a performance in which the American actually danced after twisting his ankle early in the first act, said  Emerging Pictures publicist Raymond Forsythe. 

Almost like mini-residencies, this spring's offerings from London’s Royal Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet from Moscow will each bring three unique concerts featuring some of the most beloved and stylistically demonstrative choreography born from those institutions. Participating cinemas include the  Monica 4-Plex (Santa Monica), Town Center 5 (Encino), Claremont 5 (Claremont) and Playhouse 7 (Pasadena).

For 2012-13, Rebo said, his company has gained exclusive rights to Paris Opera Ballet performances and Opera Australia’s “Opera on Sydney Harbour” series.

First up this spring is the Bolshoi's presentation of "Le Corsaire," screening Tuesday. This performance, along with a later presentation of comedic "The Bright Stream," offer viewers the chance to see the robust Russian company perform works that choreographer du jour Alexei Ratmansky brightly re-imagined for the Bolshoi dancers during his award-winning tenure there, before he brought it to his current home, American Ballet Theatre. (These screenings will bracket the real thing: ABT brings Ratmanksy's newly created "Firebird" to Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa on March 29-April 1.)

Lastly from the Bolshoi is Yuri Grigorovich's staging of "Raymonda," a three-act dramatic classic with a sample of Marius Petipa's finest choreographic morsels.  

From London, the Royal Ballet will present some of the creme de la creme of British choreographers -- Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan --  on a set list that includes live cinema-casts of “Romeo and Juliet” and “La Fille Mal Gardée” plus an encore presentation of “Giselle.”

Here are the dates and times of the spring shows, some live via satellite (as noted), the rest replays.

Watch dancer Guillaume Cote kick it up in his film [Video]

If you’ve never watched the National Ballet of Canada, or the most recent "Kings of the Dance" tour, you may not yet be familiar with Guillaume Côté, a four-star principal with the stellar Canadian company since 2004.

But he’s recently sent out a fast-spreading international calling card in the form of an impeccable two-minute film called “Lost in Motion” that is the greatest evocation of a dancer’s springy ballon yet on record.

Before 'Pina': Memorable moments in dance on film [Video]

I once asked Alvin Ailey about a particularly unfortunate video shoot and he shrugged, saying that directors who can get the financing for dance projects aren’t always the ones who can do right by the artists involved. Wim Wenders’ "Pina" is an exception. It arguably provides a limited view of Pina Bausch’s importance as a groundbreaking theater artist, but otherwise represents a touchstone of dance-for-camera excellence.

The wonders of 3-D---and Bausch’s innovations---get all the attention in Wenders’ interviews. But if it’s true that most academy members will see "Pina" on the 2-D discs provided them rather than at any 3-D screenings, then, obviously, his Oscar chances in the best feature-length documentary category will depend more on how brilliantly he shoots dance rather than any stereoscopic wizardry. And, for audiences, "Pina" may be most valuable in reminding us of the dimensional vision informing some of the greatest 2-D Hollywood dance films.

Read more about "Pina" and the legacy of dance on film.

Most theater choreographies work across the stage-space but the greatest film dances rotate that axis for greater immediacy. An iconic example is "Cool," a rare dance in "West Side Story" (1961) actually shot by co-director/choreographer Jerome Robbins. (He was fired midway through production.) In a sequence full of in-your-face dancepower, watch the Jets’ oh-so-menacing yet oh-so-cool confrontation with the camera in the final shot.

Dance review: La La La Human Steps with U.S. debut of 'New Work'

“Dancing in the dark” would make an impeccable subtitle for Édouard Lock’s provocative “New Work,” which had its U.S. debut at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Thursday night.

The ultra-athletic artists of Lock’s company, La La La Human Steps, whirled, kicked and wriggled at highest velocity. This iconoclastic style has brought both celebrity and notoriety to the Montreal choreographer. In “New Work,” Lock has gone one step further, designing a nearly dark lighting scheme, brightened only by precisely angled overhead and side spotlights. The dancers' faces and bodies were obscured, allowing Lock to sculpt a fragmented stage of blurred bodies. It’s an ironic twist that in cloaking his repetitive and gestural ballet language, Lock takes it to a more satisfying and nuanced level.

For more than 30 years, Lock has been re-writing the rules of contemporary dance and forcing audiences to revise how they see and register movement. 

In “New Work,” the viewer was best served by looking at the bodies’ wavering outlines, the women in strapless black leotards and tights, the men in black suits (though sometimes shirtless; costumes by Liz Vandal). Observe the strobe-like effect created by the ferociously waving arms and flexed hands, or the reflections that bounced off the ballerinas’ skin and pink toe shoes. Notice the exaggerated contours of sinewy muscles. 

La La La Human Steps returns to Southern California

Now celebrating 30-plus years of high stature in the concert dance world, Montreal-based La La La Human Steps remains faithful to its trademark aesthetic -- an unfathomably fast, neo-communicative physical gesturing -- which ignited fascinating onstage collaborations in the '80s (Frank Zappa, David Bowie) and leagues of young imitators after that.  

Speaking from Vancouver, Canada, this week, La La La’s founding choreographer/director, Édouard Lock, struggled with bad cellphone reception at first, announcing at one point, “OK -- I won’t move from this place.” He immediately caught the irony of his pledge, “especially for someone who is known to move so quickly.” 

Appearing in SoCal for the first time since 2008, Lock will be bringing his “New Work” to the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Thursday, featuring a new score from frequent collaborators Gavin Bryars and Blake Hargreaves played live by an onstage quartet (piano, viola, cello and saxophone). The 95-minute piece takes musical and emotional cues from Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and Gluck’s “Orpheus and Eurydice,” including “the sort of fantastical relationship to love that both [plot lines] have,” Lock says. Why did he choose to leave the work untitled? “Because the two stories are so powerful that when I look at the piece,” he explains, “I don’t particularly find a desire to create a third title to overlap the other two.” 

Aside from composers Bryars and Hargreaves (who work independently from Lock, revealing their score to him just days before touring begins), Lock collaborated here with acclaimed Mariinsky principal ballerina Diana Vishneva, who’d sought Long out to choreograph something for her. How did Vishneva's Russian heritage influence Lock's choreography? On this North American leg of the tour, which Vishneva couldn't attend, we'll see her part split between two company dancers. 

Read more about Édouard Lock and his new work.

--Jean Lenihan

Photo: La La La Human Steps. Credit: Édouard Lock

 

 

 

Dance review: 'Ten Tiny Dances' debuts at Samueli Theater

“Ten Tiny Dances” is the descriptive title for an unusual, smorgasbord-style program started 10 years ago, and it is also the challenge for its participating choreographers: to make a work of extreme brevity (five to eight minutes) on a 4-by-4-foot stage.

The show made its local debut with two performances this weekend at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts’ Off Center Festival, casting two local participants with veteran Northwest performance artists, including “Ten Tiny’s” Portland, Ore., founder Mike Barber. 

The Samueli Theater was transformed into a cabaret, with the stage in the middle, making for a casual and intimate performance. 

Each dance was a kinetic ink blot test of the artists’ creative personalities. Give a dancer a small space and surprisingly diverse reactions manifest -– acrobatics, striptease, body manipulation, madness, and, perhaps to be expected, bending the rules. Gimmickry was thankfully limited. Like National Public Radio’s three-minute fiction contest, a constraining device can unlock clever ideas. Even when it didn’t, the dance ended soon enough.  

Among the highlights was Michelle Fujii, an expert in Japanese drumming and traditional folk dance, who stuffed four bodies onstage in “Slipping Through My Fingers.” Every step and whack of the fan drum was precisely measured, timed and executed with graceful amplitude. Jennifer Backhaus worked with cheerful exuberance and gymnastic athleticism in “The Margin,” using four dancers to trace and test the boundaries of vertical and horizontal space.

Wade Madsen’s “Got It,” performed by Jack Moebius, had a similar buoyancy, with skipping and robotic bursts complementing a recorded score by Dim Dim. Barber and partner Cydney Wilkes tipped the stage on its side in “Wicked,” a comedic duet and battle of body manipulation, costume hijinx and feathers. 

In “Tangle,” Margretta Hansen crisscrossed the theater, tying up patrons in the unraveling yarn of her knitted sweater (costume by Kim Mathiesen), and finally concluded onstage with a silent scream of despair. 

Carla Mann’s “Snag” offered a lyrical duo coarsely executed; while Meg Wolfe’s “Shannon’s With The Band (again)” explored a morose character, part drum major, part go-go dancer. Both Linda Austin in “Nigh” and Angelle Hebert in “Splinter” (with Mann performing) went over to the dark side, reveling in over-the-top psychosis. Austin struggled through a forest of paper, while “Splinter’s” Jesse Berdine chopped the stage with an ax. 

A family emergency caused the last-minute withdrawal of choreographer Melanie Rios Glaser, so Madsen stepped in with a witty, imaginary striptease, “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby,” to a Judy Garland recording. 

Big dances have their attraction, but "Ten Tiny Dances" demonstrated that size isn't everything.

The program repeats Saturday night.

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Dance reviews from the Los Angeles Times

Off Center Festival draws younger crowd to Segerstrom Center

-- Laura Bleiberg

Photo: “Nigh,” choreography, visual design and performance by Linda Austin. Credit: Doug Gifford

Pop choreographer with a busy schedule Jamie King

In the 1980s, a Wisconsin teenager named Jamie King papered his walls with posters of MTV heroes Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince and re-created and rearranged their videos, move by move, in his mom’s basement. Within a decade, this mostly self-taught dancer landed the single open spot for a male dancer on Jackson’s 1992-93 “Dangerous” world tour; within two decades, he’d become a director of multimillion-dollar tours, conceiving arena shows for such passionate and exacting artists as Madonna, Prince, Rhianna, Celine Dion, Christine Aguilera, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin.

"He knows what I like," said Madonna in an interview last week. "We can finish each other’s sentences." 

During an afternoon conversation at the Polo Lounge, tour director extraordinaire Jamie King, 39, laughed at his trajectory from basement-to-arena with these music superstars. “That is irony for you,” he said. “Or maybe manifestation is a better word.” 

Content to be a behind-the-scenes force until now, King is in for a huge bump in exposure. His current chores include his work as director-writer of the Cirque du Soleil/Michael Jackson tribute world tour, “The Immortal” (next week at the Honda Center and then at Staples Center), as well as his stint directing Madonna’s lavish Super Bowl performance (Feb. 5), and last but not least his on-screen role in the new Latin-"American Idol"-esque TV series with Jennifer Lopez and Mark Anthony called “Q’Viva!,” (airing this month on Univision and later in spring on Fox). 

 Here's the Arts & Books profile of Jamie King.

And watch him in action back in the day, in rehearsal with Michael Jackson (King has a sweatshirt around his waist).