Dance review: Ballet Geneve debuts Benjamin Millepied works

Touring with contemporary, soft-slippered ballets, Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève made its West Coast debut at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Friday with a trio of eye-catching works set to canonical ballet music choreographed by Benjamin Millepied, now known widely for his work in “Black Swan.” 

Heretofore unseen in the U.S., “Amoveo,” “La Spectre de la Rose,” and “Les Sylphides” gave weekend concertgoers a taste of the bright designs, group dynamics and knotty, weighted movement lexicon that stand to be a fixed point in Los Angeles' dance future. (Millepied has plans for a new “L.A Dance Project” arts collective in alliance with the Music Center next season.) Stimulated by humor, sexuality and surprise, these dances never sagged. But they had some off-flavors. 

In “Amoveo” (2006), set to four excerpts from Philip Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach,” relationships moved from delineation to unreadability in seconds, while Paul Cox’s Op Art scrim filled with two slow-moving lines of color that multiplied into a dizzying crosshatch. Tangled, exhaustive partnerings echoed the ceasless looping organ. Finishes were casual, even ugly.

Dance review: Misty Copeland and new dancers in ABT's 'Firebird'

Igor Stravinsky’s sensational “Firebird” ballet demands a vivid design, and Simon Pastukh’s scorched, metallic forest (ignited by Wendell Harrington’s projections), along with Galina Solovyeva’s haute-goth costumes, deliver a strong pop vision to Alexei Ratmansky’s new ballet for American Ballet Theatre. But on opening weekend at the Segerstrom Center, a number of ABT’s world-class dancers mixed poorly with the costumes and struggled with their mechanics. Performances varied a lot, and backstage tinkerings (the princesses' wigs came and went) were ongoing.

In the first and third cast, neither Firebird transformed beyond human form, though the previously reviewed Natalia Osipova and Isabella Boylston both danced bravely. But Boylston --  struggling for the right balance of attack -- came off like a curious, Gaga-esque guest. As the Prince with Boylston, Alexandre Hammoudi was regal and somewhat stiff.

Ratmansky’s revised storyline and forward-backward movement idiom finally emerged clearly with  second cast leads Misty Copeland and Herman Cornejo, a hypnotizing pair. Cornejo masterfully sustained tension and contained his energy, thus giving even more force to Copeland’s abandoned, creaturely performance. With them, the audience’s standing ovation was absolutely spontaneous. Too bad Ratmansky wasn’t onstage that night, for he deserved it too.

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.

ALSO:

Bolshoi and London Ballets, coming to a theater near you

Theater review: 'Once' on Broadway

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.

Dance review: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at Segerstrom

This post has been corrected. See note below.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, touring for the first time under new artistic director Robert Battle, delivered a heady, reverberating concoction of pieces -- including the company premiere of Paul Taylor’s Baroque pure-dance classic “Arden Court” (1981) and the California premiere of hip-hop choreographer Rennie Harris’ “Home” (2011) -- on the first of three distinct repertory programs playing through Sunday at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center for the Arts.

A variety of movement techniques and thematic echoes made for a rare, unflagging mixed bill -- one of the first in recent memory that didn’t ask Ailey’s masterpiece closer, “Revelations,” to rouse the audience from programming that hammers with just too much energy, nobility and muscle and not enough subtle challenge. 

PHOTOS: Alvin Ailey on camera

Stylistic range has always been a tenet of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater; even when founding choreographer Alvin Ailey was alive he commissioned work from other artists. But nothing of late has put these dancers to the test like the simple lyricism of “Arden Court,” one of the great confections by Taylor, the 20th century’s most slyly crafty pioneering choreographers, set to William Boyce symphonic movements. Under a massive pink rose, a wave of six bare-chested men flood the space with lunging Martha Graham-like runs (heads darting, arms rising and blossoming overhead), giving way to grand allegro spinning jumps and tumbles, all unfolding in unexpected patterns that ebb and circle and collapse elegantly in on themselves.  

Grammy-nominated Pilobolus gets ready for the big night [Video]

As the leadership team of Pilobolus Dance Theater readies itself to fly to Los Angeles for Sunday’s Grammy Awards -– the group is nominated for best short form music video for “All Is Not Lost” –- the dance troupe’s co-executive director Lily Binns is feeling “really, really nervous” (“we’re up against Adele!”) and quite celebratory about the way the troupe is expanding its artistic reach.

This is not the company’s first foray into music videos. Rather incongruously, Pilobolus dancers appeared as background elements in Marilyn Manson’s 1999 “The Beautiful People” video.

But this Grammy nod, shared with OK Go’s frontman Damian Kulash Jr. and his videographer/choreographer sister Trish Sie, was based on “truly a full collaboration for us,” Binns says. “We share a similiar sensibility with OK Go and Trish Sie,” she explains. “We all like making the impossible look possible.”

For “All Is Not Lost,” Pilobolus and OK Go set up shop for five days in a small town hall near the dance troupe’s Connecticut base (“the Woodbury Town Hall didn’t know what hit it,” she says) and shot the dancers and musicians from beneath a large glass platform atop which they undertake vintage Pilobolus contortions and organize their bare standing feet to spell out Roman letters and Japanese Katakana syllabary.

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.

Dance review: Diavolo's 'Fearful Symmetries' at the Valley Arts Center

After its alfresco launch with live orchestration in 2010 at the Hollywood Bowl, Diavolo Dance Theater’s “Fearful Symmetries” was surely going to take a hit when it moved indoors. Yet it's hard to imagine a kinder transition for Jacques Heim’s exalted explorations of manhandling-architecture than to alight within the glowing glass-paneled grandeur of the year-old Valley Performing Arts Center’s Great Hall. 

Kara Hill’s ceremonious multi-story lobby -- with a soaring staircase that bisects the levels, creating framed containers for the moving pedestrians -- coolly ushered in Heim’s feverish explorations of bodies and art in motion Thursday evening, part of Diavolo's national tour, which will return to Southern California in March. 

PHOTOS: Diavolo Dance Theater at Hollywood Bowl

A full-tilt bill of ensemble fare, the tour (with recorded music) pairs the ever-shifting right-angled industrial landscape of “Fearful Symmetries” (2010) with the plunging, keeling galleon from “Trajectoire” (1999/2001), the troupe’s daredevil signature work set to Nathan Wang’s score. Shauna Martinez plays the heraldic figure in both works, which -- when paired -- make for a journey from the subtle (relative subtlety, of course; Heim is all about whipping energy into a frenzy) to the sublime.

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

 

 

 

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).