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. 

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.

RELATED:

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

Performance review: 'O(h)' at the Actors Company Theatre

Care for a little deconstruction with your dance show?  Wisecracking Liz Casebolt and Joel Smith take you under the tulle in “O(h),” their innovative if uneven hour of choreography and commentary now at the Actors Company Theatre in West Hollywood.

Part lecture, part striptease, part improv, “O(h)” plays like a TED talk with sweat. Smith’s strapping physique is the evening’s eye candy, but the subject matter is dance itself, that sublime, pretentious, elusive art form. If nothing else, Casebolt and Smith are cheeky enough to admit their chosen profession is rife with the ridiculous. That prima ballerina’s penchant for overacting? Running around in circles to indicate a long journey? Martha Graham angst? Lame. 

There’s nothing like hearing dish from experts, especially on their elegant playground of a set, a pristine box mapped with glowing, colored EL  wire created by architects Hadrian Predock and John Frane.

Dance review: Los Angeles Ballet polishes 'The Nutcracker'

Continuing to establish itself as a spirited and sophisticated -- if itinerant -- ballet company, Los Angeles Ballet opened its 2011-12 season over the weekend at the Alex Theatre in Glendale with a memorable cast for its distinctive, inspired “The Nutcracker.” 

As helmed by artistic directors Thordal Christensen and Colleen Neary, Los Angeles Ballet’s “Nutcracker” delivers an admirable depth and intelligence of design combined with a light-handed approach to the ballet’s traditional Christmas-party characterizations and plot line.

PHOTOS: LOS ANGELES BALLET'S "THE NUTCRACKER"

Catherine Kanner’s luscious Act 1 setting is 1912 Los Angeles, an interior drawing room so plush and timbered that even with its electric lights it still feels redolent of Tchaikovsky’s time.  

Inhabiting this velvety parlor, the pale, winsome Clara (Mia Katz) and her incandescent Uncle Drosselmeyer (Nicolas de la Vega) make a poetic pair, and it’s easy to root for their partnership.  Usually an aged, menacing creature, Drosselmeyer is drawn here as blessedly young and gregarious. De la Vega’s sweeping gestures and scampering feet swell to light the whole stage.

Review: Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Trey McIntyre Project

Vibrant New Orleans-style jazz and brilliant contemporary ballet collided in ways at once unpredictable, satisfying and often wondrous when the musicians of Preservation Hall and the dancers of Trey McIntyre met at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Tuesday.

With “Band's in Town,” the eight members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band immediately established their stylistic authority and consummate skill as soloists, playing from a tiny platform at the far end of the hall. The prevailing acoustics masked the amplified vocals but kept Freddie Lonzo's trombone and Ben Jaffe's tuba nearly seismic, even in the fabulous massed jams.

If the band upheld a noble American tradition on Tuesday, the choreography extended it by finding exciting movement equivalents for some of the bedrock principles of jazz -- intricacy, for starters, plus individual expression and a sense of unbridled syncopation. In the 9-month-old “The Sweeter End,” the 10 members of the Trey McIntyre Project performed with devastating sharpness a breathless, engulfing, high-speed amalgam of ballet steps, gymnastic feats, ballroom fragments and eruptions of snake-hips undulation. And it always flowed, always swung.

Theater review: Twyla Tharp's 'Come Fly Away' at the Pantages

If Beyoncé isn't already at the Pantages taking notes, she should be. No choreographer alive knows more about getting pop songs on their feet than Twyla Tharp -- and just about everything she knows is on view in “Come Fly Away,” the full-evening salute to the vocals of Frank Sinatra that opened Tuesday for a two-week run.

In various forms, under various titles, this show has been around since 2009. The Pantages version is a half-hour shorter than the 2010 Broadway edition, with seven songs, a dancer, an onstage vocalist and an intermission jettisoned for the tour. At a lean 80 minutes, it charts the formation and rivalries of four couples in a nightclub that sports a sensational live band upstage.

PHOTOS: 'Come Fly Away' at the Pantages

Under the supervision of Dave Pierce, that band artfully supplements and often dominates the classic arrangements and orchestrations of Sinatra's recordings. What's more, Peter McBoyle's sound design makes Sinatra's voice seem a living entity -- as if he's offstage, mike in hand. 

Dance review: 'Kings of the Dance' returns to Segerstrom Center for the Arts

Lucky Ivan Vasiliev. Of the five stars in “Kings of the Dance,” the popular touring show that returned to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts this weekend, he was the only one to receive the proper coronation that he –- and the others -- deserved. 

Without Vasiliev, and without German-born choreographer Patrick De Bana, who spectacularly uncorked Vasiliev’s animal strengths in a melodramatic 10-minute solo, it would have been an underwhelming night. 

“Kings,” which is co-produced by the Segerstrom Center and impresarios Sergei and Gaiane Danilian, has been uniting small groupings of the world’s greatest dancers since 2006. In addition to Vasiliev (of the Bolshoi), the current “Kings” incarnation features Guillaume Côté (National Ballet of Canada), Marcelo Gomes (American Ballet Theatre), David Hallberg (ABT and Bolshoi) and Denis Matvienko (Mariinsky Ballet). 

Contemporary ballets were specially commissioned to demonstrate a fuller range of the dancers' artistry  than the leaps, spins and beats that made them famous. That’s the theory. 

The reality is more problematic, and it hit home especially with the current production, seen Friday evening. The men aren’t actually shown to best advantage. The program selections, especially the solos, were repetitive in tone and gestural language. Indeed, if this was your first trip to the dance, you might reasonably assume that it is an art form of wild and hieroglyphic arm gesticulation. 

Dance review: Kyle Abraham's 'Radio Show' at REDCAT

Onstage at the REDCAT, New York-based choreographer Kyle Abraham is dancing a sublimely funky R&B solo with such perfect panache that it's a shock when he suddenly pauses, his head sadly nodding, one hand twitching, as if his soul train had become suddenly, irrevocably derailed.

The back of his shirt is slashed and torn, the recorded music chopped into a collage of fragments, and the sense of continuity -- social as well as personal -- fractured beyond repair. Welcome to “The Radio Show,” Abraham's nonlinear 75-minute action-painting of contemporary America that opened Wednesday for a four-performance run.

Abraham's feelings about the closure of a Pittsburgh radio station and his father's descent into Alzheimer's shaped the piece, but its sense of displacement and loss transcends specifics. One moment Elyse Morris will exult in her high-voltage virtuosity and the next her control will shatter into violent spasms or a mournful stillness. Intimacy between Rena Butler and Chalvar Monteiro looks promising but hasn't a chance. And Hsiao-Jou Tang doesn't even struggle against the changes she sees in herself. Her meditative solo-in-silence is mostly about resignation.

With few exceptions, the pervasive movement style is so bold and even fearless that you might not spot the intricacy of the choreography until the whole seven-member company dances in pluperfect unison. Indeed, matched moves make the second half of the piece an exciting company showpiece -- but often at the cost of the thematic rigor of Part 1.

There are a few intimations of Abraham's initial premise (his twitching hand just before the final fade-out, for example). But mostly you'll find a more literal approach to the selected songs along with an audience-participation segment conveying the forced jollity of a call-in radio show. It's all entertaining, one way or another, but not as remarkable as the deeply mournful vision brilliantly physicalized early on.

In addition to the dancers mentioned, the company includes Rachelle Rafailedes and Maleek Mahkail Washington. Dan Scully designed a lighting plan that subjects the dancers to moments of painful isolation as well as glaring assault. Somber music by Amber Lee Parker supplements the pop tracks dominating the evening.

-- Lewis Segal

Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion: “The Radio Show,” REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., downtown L.A. 8:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday. $20 and $25. (213) 237-2800 or www.redcat.org.

Photo: A scene from Kyle Abraham's"The Radio Show." Credit: Steven Schreiber.

Dance review: Hofesh Shechter's 'Political Mother' at UCLA Live

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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 headlines into a rigorous theatrical commentary on collective life during 21st century wartime.

Now the only U.S. city to have seen both of Shechter’s two international tours (the mixed bill “Uprising/In Your Rooms”  played Royce Hall in 2009), Los Angeles is fortunate to bear witness to the arrival of a dance/theater artist with this much commitment and voice. In “Political Mother” (2010), his first full-length piece, Shechter delivers 70 minutes of loud, suffocating musical and theatrical homogeneity in order to indicate the real brutalism that a society bears after years of unrelenting political tension and frustration.  

The piece opens with formally poised samurai in stylized armor and sword who suddenly, violently, crashes to the ground in a hara-kiri plunge. A crowd of dancers emerges from a blackout like a storm of tumbleweeds in desert-sand fatigues -– rising, falling, twitching, skipping -– they move continuously but always with semi-collapsed and contracted carriage (is that sword still there?). Shaped by despair, their arms lift skyward but never fully extend; torsos droop or fling back, never stand simply erect; all eye contact or gaze is missing.  This absence of complete limb extension or facial gaze weirdly and instantly strips them of all individuality and character. (Is this then what it means to be human? The reaching we do? How and where we fix our eyes?)  

Besides their capped postures, these groups are hemmed in by an ingenious sonic barrier – instead of a scrim there is a literal wall-of-sound, composed by Shechter, made manifest. The ground level features a row of militaristic drummers (whose eyes we can see); stacked atop of them, in a second tier, is a row of heavy-metal guitarists flanking a central showman-figure (sometimes a black-suited dictator, sometimes a shrieking rock vocalist).  

A second group of dancers emerges, in more colorful clothes, who present more organized, ritualistic Semitic phrases, like Teyve-style shimmying torsos, and legs stepping in single time while fingers tickle the air by their faces. Yet there is no interaction between the two groups, nor any penetration into the area where the musicians play, until the very last moments. 

“Political Mother” is not an easy work: The relentless sonic discordance and movement repetition drove a number of folks out of the theater.  Much like the stark Japanese Butoh dance tradition, there seems little forward motion within the grim and disfigured expressions at first, yet there is a real integrity and dedication to the chosen stylistic parameters that eventually pays off. When Shechter’s beaten tribe finally accumulates a new gesture, and then a new sense of bearing, it is as thrilling and organic and consequential as a genetic leap.  

-- Jean Lenihan

“Political Mother,”  UCLA's Royce Hall, Thursday, 8 p.m. $24-$41.www.uclalive.org, (310) 825.2101.

For the Record: Thursday, Oct. 20, 8:35: Hofesh Shechter's name was mispelled in earlier versions of this post as Hofesh Shecter.

Dance review: New York City Ballet Moves in Santa Barbara

This post has been corrected. See note below for details.

Can an appetizer-size portion of New York City Ballet be as gratifying as the entire multi-course company?

That was the question Wednesday, as New York City Ballet Moves made its Southern California debut at the historic Grenada Theatre (with an annoyingly creaking stage), presented by UC Santa Barbara’s Arts & Lectures. With no more than 20 principals, soloists and corps de ballet members, this ensemble is nimble, created to tour. Even better, it brings along its own musicians.

The downside is Moves’ restricted repertory; on this occasion, no works by co-founder George Balanchine, the artistic foundation of City Ballet. That was a disappointment. 

PHOTOS: New York City Ballet

Some masterpieces do fit Moves, and quite nicely. “Dances at a Gathering” (1969), Jerome Robbins' work for five couples, celebrates love, playfulness and Chopin’s piano pieces. Pianist Susan Walters began, and Gonzalo Garcia ambled on, dreamily applying gentle assurance to a slow mazurka.

Just that fast, we were reminded that certain dance qualities remain sacrosanct at NYCB. It is embedded in its genetic code that in any size of ensemble the dancers will fully shape and make physical a score’s tonal colors and pulse. Most everyone revealed themselves through exquisite timing and clarity.