Dance review: Ronald K. Brown's Evidence at the Ahmanson Theatre

Choreographer Ronald K. Brown flashed a startling, broad smile while performing Friday night with  Evidence, a Dance Company. His Brooklyn-based contemporary dance troupe enjoyed its second-only Music Center appearance this weekend, courtesy of Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center.

Pacing through his latest work, “On Earth Together,” to the music of Stevie Wonder, Brown's glowing expression caused us to consider what a grim business most contemporary dance has become. Beauty radiated from the Ahmanson stage, as Evidence, a wonderful troupe of 10, boogied through three of Brown’s sensual, sweet-natured works.

Born in the fabled Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood 46 years ago, Brown belongs to a generation of black choreographers who toggle easily between the contemporary urban vernacular, its African roots and dance post-modernism. He’s got Alvin Ailey’s distinct sense of place and Katherine Dunham’s Afro-Cuban earthiness; in his zeal for steady-state locomotion, he evokes the minimalist Laura Dean.  Most recently,  he choreographed the new Broadway revival of "Porgy and Bess."

In the first piece, “Ebony Magazine: To a Village” (1996), company members -- mostly African American, one West African, and the superb Arcell Cabuag, born in the Bay Area of Filipino descent -- gave the simple dance walk luxuriant reading. They sank into their hips and chugged their arms alongside, sometimes tossing a hand in the air. Dressed by costumer Omotayo Wunmi Olaiya (a great look, the men’s flowing white pajamas neatly clamped by dark vests), they primped and vogued.

Their soft parade, padded and lush, led them to the stage apron for some top-notch action. Up and down, then in and out, they undulated their spines, in waves, frissons, sometimes a body hiccup. To rap music, the dance enacted a village’s communal rites (Brown has spent considerable time in Africa). Hands clasped in prayer position, church bells chimed, the ocean and its seagulls sounded. Three women, heads bent solemnly, circled a white-frocked dead body.

L.A.'s Body Traffic wins $25,000 Joyce Theater Foundation grant

In flagrant disregard of its own name, Body Traffic, the Los Angeles contemporary dance company, is racing ahead, as though on a congestion-free commute across the Santa Monica Freeway. The 4-year-old troupe has just been awarded a $25,000 “commissioning grant” from the New York City-based Joyce Theater Foundation.

Let’s shift to reverse gear, and back this story up. Last January, Body Traffic’s close collaborator, choreographer Barak Marshall, in tandem with the dancers, garnered first prize in “The A.W.A.R.D. Show,” co-produced by the Joyce and REDCAT. The $10,000 prize got earmarked for a new Marshall-Body Traffic collaboration. 

The Joyce is now doubling down on the Traffickers, extending an additional $25,000 to underwrite Marshall’s piece. It will premiere June 5-6, during Body Traffic’s two-night stint at the Joyce Theater’s annual Gotham Dance Festival. 

Body Traffic represents the dance company of the future, according to the Joyce. The theater’s executive director, Linda Shelton, said by phone from New York: “We are a bit concerned by the model of the single artistic director company. In many, many cases it’s absolutely fine, but we see cracks in the model.” 

Los Angeles fundraiser named executive director of Miami City Ballet

Nicholas T. Goldsborough, a Los Angeles resident since 1980 and a longtime arts fundraiser, has been appointed the executive director of the Miami City Ballet, the company is announcing this week. Goldsborough has helped raise funding for prominent U.S. arts institutions, including the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Valley Performing Arts Center and the Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C.

The Rochester, N.Y.-born Goldsborough chatted last week in anticipation of the announcement. He said: “I’m creating a short- and long-term plan that will strengthen Miami City Ballet from a financial perspective.”   

“I’d like to see a $30-million endowment for this institution, built over five to 10 years, both from pledges and estate gifts,” he said, noting that the company now has a small endowment of a few million dollars.

Goldsborough joins the respected classic ballet troupe at a time of transition. Just last month, founding artistic director Edward Villella, 75, announced his retirement, which will cap one of ballet’s most enduring and distinguished careers. The success of the beloved former New York City Ballet principal dancer in establishing ballet in South Florida has been one of the gleaming triumphs of dance's  post-Balanchine era.

“Edward has created one of the three great ballet companies in America,” Goldsborough said. “In this particular repertoire [Balanchine choreography], they rival the NYCB, and some people say on a given night, they do it better.”

Dancemaker Kyle Abraham makes it personal

Like Martha Graham, choreographer Kyle Abraham hails from Pittsburgh. But unlike Graham, who never posted or tweeted and whose lover, Louis Horst, called her “Mirthless Martha,” Abraham has 4,000 friends following him on Facebook. Consequently we know a lot about him, like that he’s seriously bugged by Beyoncé’s heavy borrowing of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography, that he enjoys Miguel but not as much as Kanye, and that he digs Kevin Wynn’s dance classes at Steps New York.

Abraham brings his Steel City-inspired “The Radio Show” in four performances at REDCAT this weekend.   

Behind the Facebook chatter looms a hardworking dancemaker. Awards and accolades are stacking up: a spot in Dance Magazine’s 25 to Watch, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, a Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship. “My main thing has always been choreography,” he said last summer at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. “I was always making up dances in my room [as a kid].

This is a guy who stays poised. Asked by two giggling interviewers in a post-BESSIE award show conversation how he plans to celebrate snagging first prize for the “The Radio Show,” Abraham responded coolly, “maybe [I’ll] cry a little bit. Then hang out with my mother, my sister, and my friends.”

That’s not mirthless. It’s just serious. Abraham’s intensity is clear in the video of his solo, “Pookie Jenkins,” which zoomed dance-world attention onto him. 

Read the full story about about passionate and gifted Kyle Abraham. 

— Debra Levine

Photo: Kyle Abraham. Credit: Steven Schreiber

Dance review: Mark Morris Dance Group performs ‘L’Allegro’ with L.A. Opera

"L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato," choreographer Mark Morris' highly regarded dance work set to George Frideric Handel's sprawling baroque score, zoomed to "masterpiece" status at its debut in 1988; it's a biggie, a must, we're told. In Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion this weekend, the lucky dance maker had as his collaborator the Los Angeles Opera -- its orchestra, choir and four gifted solo singers.

"L'Allegro," restaged in honor of Mark Morris Dance Group's 30th anniversary, unfolded in two generous halves, the first lengthier. The work's nice-and-easy pacing came as a blessing to the jumpy, text-messaging generation: OMG, Handel rocks!

Morris delivered his big meal in dollops that illustrated a paired set of odes by English poet John Milton. The "L'Allegro" bit connoted the vivacious, actively led life; the "Penseroso," the contemplative and introverted. Based on these truly lovely poems (as program inserts, unreadable in the dark theater), Handel spun his sublime score. Enter a librettist, Charles Jennens, who authored the "il Moderato" text, which advocates a middle path between extremes. (Are you getting all this, children?) The unutterably ambitious Morris united all this heady content when he was a 32-year-old dance director of Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels.

On Thursday night, Morris showed his best known pure-dance mode by moving his 24 dancers through stage patterns suggestive of Busby Berkeley with Central European folk-dance roots. An impressive softness in the barefooted pitter-patter added to the work's initial serenity, and Morris' circular, zig-zagged and flat-lined patterns pleased.

A celebration of dance in film at TCM Classic Film Festival

Hollywood Boulevard, once dotted with ballet/tap/jazz studios, celebrated the joy of dance this weekend. The second TCM Classic Film Festival -- a four-day event held at the Roosevelt Hotel, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Mann's Chinese Six, Egyptian Theatre and the Music Box -- feted an unusual number of dance legends along with its other classic-movie fare.

A 60th-anniversary restoration of “An American in Paris” opened the festival Thursday night. Gene Kelly's costar, Leslie Caron, forever a Parisian princess, joined the gala in person. Screenings of “Royal Wedding” (1951) and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (1954), Michael Kidd’s outing for top-dog male dancers of the '50s, were graced by star Jane Powell's in-person presence. Mickey Rooney and Debbie Reynolds rounded out the movie hoofers attending TCM Fest.

Sunday was a dance lover’s paradise. Larry Billman, a foremost movie and television dance expert, moderated a panel discussion featuring Marge Champion, Debbie Allen and Vince Paterson.  

"You sweat, you cry, you bond, you fall in love,” when you dance in a movie, according to Billman. But MGM musical veteran Marge Champion, beautiful at 91, who costarred with husband Gower (notably  in “Show Boat”) remembered more: “There were endless waits between takes. They didn’t understand how hard it was to warm up your body and stay warm.”

Music-video pioneer Vince Paterson, who directed Michael Jackson (“Beat It,” “Smooth Criminal”) and Madonna (“Vogue”), attended opening night.

“I was watching all those long takes in 'An American in Paris,' ” Paterson admitted. Collaborating with director Lars Von Trier and Bjork on “Dancer in the Dark” the choreographer deployed 100 cameras. “Then the hell was for the editors,” he quipped.

But dance’s presence in film has a dark back story. According to Champion: “My father [the great English-born ballet instructor Ernest Belcher, a key Los Angeles dance pioneer] choreographed 'The Merry Widow' in 1924 for [Erich] von Stroheim. He trained Mae Murray and John Gilbert. But his  [Belcher’s] name is nowhere in the credits.”

Paterson added, “In the film business, we are the only people on the set who don’t have a union.”

Allen, stage veteran of “Sweet Charity” and “West Side Story” and of TV's “Fame,” gained directorial chops on her own: “When I got 'Fame,' I spent hours in the editing room,” she said, then adding ruefully, “All those years on 'Fame,' not a dime of residuals for my dancers. Not a dime for me.”

Alvin Ailey dances into Los Angeles with a Hancock Park party

Thursday evening’s Center Dance Arts celebration of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s 10-performance run at Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center, which kicks off Friday, pitted guest against guest, but in a good way.

The private party, hosted by CDA Chair Mattie McFadden-Lawson and Music Center Board of Directors member Michael A. Lawson in their Hancock Park Italian Renaissance home, came to a head when 200-plus dance lovers crunched into one room to evade the strangely blustery April weather. Out of doors, it was, as Angelenos like to say when the thermometer drops below 60 degrees, “freezing cold.” The upside of this gathering, which also celebrated the 10th anniversary of CDA (the patronage association supporting the Music Center’s dance programming) was that everyone got to know each other that much better.

Literally rubbing elbows in the entry hall of the "Ali mansion," named for its previous owner, heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, a rip-roaring mash-up of L.A. celebs and their admirers sipped, chewed and conversed. Actor Dennis Haysbert (“I love art. I love it all. Dance, theater, music.”), one of the evening’s co-hosts and a recent appointee to the Music Center board of directors, mixed with Sharon Leal and Judge Mablean Ephriam. Courtney B. Vance shared that he and wife Angela Bassett will introduce their 5-year-old twins to Ailey performances this weekend. (“The girl will love it. But I’ll be doing time in the lobby with my son.”)

Dance review: Aszure Barton & Artists at Irvine Barclay Theatre

Southern California has been good to rising choreographic star Aszure Barton this year. In January the Bolshoi's Yekaterina Shipulina danced Barton's made-in-Moscow solo, "Dumka," in "Reflections" at Costa Mesa's Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts. In February, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago performed her "Untouched" at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Thursday night, Barton clocked another Orange County outing, again at the Barclay, which this time hosted the Canadian-born choreographer's own group, Aszure Barton & Artists. On Saturday she participates in the opening season of the Valley Performing Arts Center in Northridge with "Busk" and "Blue Soup," both impressive in her troupe's area debut in Irvine.
 
The only inkling of the 35-year-old up-and-comer's serious ballet training (she's a product of Toronto's National Ballet School and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School) was her scissor-strength legs rooting her during her solo appearance that is part of "Blue Soup," a bundled pastiche of her past works. From this strong base, Barton stretched her torso, and stretched the lycra, too, of designer Fritz Masten's smart electric-blue pantsuit. Named for the color, the choreographer admitted in a private conversation that blue's her favorite.

UC Irvine student wins design competition for José Limón Dance Company

Sheryl Liu, a third-year scenic design student at UC Irvine, has been selected to create new sets and costumes for the José Limón Dance Company’s upcoming revival of Limón’s masterwork “The Emperor Jones.”

 Set to the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos, the dramatic dance work dating from 1956 draws upon Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 naturalistic stage play about a tyrannical home-grown dictator.

The original set and costume design, indicated in the photo of Limón below, will get a smart update in the hands of Liu. Only 26, she has contributed to projects at the Old Globe, the Lansburgh, and the Roundabout Theater companies, as well as at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Her designs for “Salomé” and “La Bohème” have been selected for EMERGE: 2011 at the Prague Quadrennial, the world’s top international stage design exhibition.
 
The Taiwan-raised Liu says, “A very funny thing is that they invited me to their workshop and I got there and learned that they didn’t like what I submitted. I think why I won is that I was able to let go of what I originally did and work with the director [former Limón dancer Clay Taliaferro]. I watched the choreography again and asked him what each section meant to him and what he wanted to communicate.

“I’m really excited, it’s my first job, and it’s a very good dance piece. It’s very complex, especially what the Emperor goes through: a series of nightmares and tortures from his past and also some African-American history is put in. I’m very moved by the dance.”

Karole Armitage shows her dance moves from ballet to Broadway

 
Karole Armitage makes an odd candidate for Orange County "it" girl. The former high priestess of downtown Manhattan hip demonstrates how far she’s stretched her choreography career with two mainstream outings in one week at Segerstrom Center for the Arts.

 "Fractus," her 10-minute commissioned piece for the home-cooked Russian-ballet mash-up "Reflections," continuing through Sunday, intertwines Bolshoi dancers Yekaterina Krysanova and Denis Savin in a staccato rendering of Rhys Chatham’s crunching electric guitar score.

Then, just as the Russians vacate the Costa Mesa theater (heading for "Reflections" performances in Moscow), in will straggle the barefoot hippies of "Hair," following a run at the Pantages Theatre. Armitage’s copasetic dances for a revival of the 1967 rock musical garnered her a 2009 Tony nomination and a resilient Broadway credential.

Kansas-raised Armitage, 56, admits she never saw the original stage show. And she’s far from reverential about Twyla Tharp’s liquid lava-lamp work for Miloš Forman’s 1979 film: "The Tharp dances were almost too formal and too dancey. I found them too technical, trying to be impressive. I thought that was not the right approach.

"I wanted it to be intimate, spontaneous and personal. I wanted it to look like everyone was making it up, like there wasn’t a real choreographer. And I would disappear," she says, her clarion voice radiating confidence.