Performance Review: 'Tempest: Without a Body' at the Million Dollar Theater

A cross-cultural ceremony of suffering, “Tempest: Without a Body” keeps returning to images of a fallen angel helplessly mourning the destruction of the Pacific.

Created by Samoan director and choreographer Lemi Ponifasio for his New Zealand company MAU, the hallucinatory 90-minute production arrived as a REDCAT presentation Saturday at the Million Dollar Theater. This antique downtown movie palace is about the size of the Ahmanson, but has problematic sight lines for a staging with abundant floor action.

The appearances and screams of Frances Chan, as the angel, punctuated the plotless, nonlinear work. At first she stood beneath an enormous hanging panel that resembled textured metal or drywall, and when, later on, she held up a hand dripping with blood, the whole panel became slowly stained in crimson.

Other recurring figures included Ioane Papalii -- his writhing torso isolated by one of the spectacular lighting effects designed by Helen Todd -- and Charles Koroneho, a tattooed ambassador of Maori tradition both in a solo derived from fearsome haka rituals and in a blistering speech remembering how Christians “despoiled the land, raped our women and children and murdered our ancestors.”

Dance review: Nederlands Dans Theater at the Music Center

What's black and white and red all over? “Silent Screen,” the mysterious, alluring multimedia spectacle by Paul Lightfoot and Sol León that Nederlands Dans Theater performed with its usual brilliance on Wednesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Americans like to think they call the shots on modern dance. But even without the visionary Jirí Kylián at the helm, the NDT company in its 52nd season sustains a matchless level of dancing power and choreographic creativity.

Resident dance-makers Lightfoot and León provide proof with a 2005 work that harnesses recorded music by Philip Glass to an action-plan that carries Jorge Nozal and Parvaneh Scharafali on a journey from beach to forest to interiors, cloudscapes, starscapes -- and back.

These environments materialize as film projections on three large connected screens, the edges slightly mismatched as in vintage Cinerama features. The opening offers a startling special effect: three dancers in silhouette against those screens with one of them suddenly revealed as a filmic illusion. But as the cast enlarges to 10, the panoramic imagery yields to pure, stark choreographic invention at the imposing scale and energy of the music.

The duet in white for Ema Yuasa and Brett Conway is a highlight, at once heroic and intimate, technically demanding in its gymnastic density yet also suggesting that hearts and souls are on the line. There are weaknesses -- the small-scale, rather shopworn gestural vocabulary given Scharafali, for example -- but “Silent Screen” never proves less than accessible, exciting and imaginative.

Dance review: Bolshoi 'Reflections' at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts

Like the first “Kings of Dance”  program in 2006, “Reflections” offers an evening of premieres at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, created by choreographers from Europe and the U.S. for stellar, adventurous classical dancers -- in this case, seven Russian ballerinas trained at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy.

On Thursday, the evening began promisingly with glimpses of the magical, long-limbed lyricism of Polina Semionova, now with the Staatsballett Berlin. But, nearly three hours later, we'd been shown nothing more in her art, nothing deeper than that display of her obvious spectacular virtues---and three choreographers had tried.

Similarly, the extraordinary dynamism of the Bolshoi Ballet's Natalia Osipova was demonstrated repeatedly but superficially, and the showpieces for the other women proved no more satisfying. Worse, most of these tailor-made choreographies resembled workshop etudes, far too small in scale for this hall and far from the cutting edge of contemporary work anywhere these women currently dance.

 The Bolshoi Ballet visitors seemed especially underserved. Aszure Barton's “Dumka” (to Tchaikovsky) assigned willowy, intense Yekaterina Shipulina an indecipherable action-plan. Lucinda Childs' “From the Book of Harmony” failed to harness the powerful engine of John Adams' music and left Anastasia Stashkevich looking ill at ease. Karole Armitage's “Fractus” (music by Rhys Chatham) used blackouts to splinter an assaultive duet for Yekaterina Krysanova and Denis Savin, but this bold structural experiment ended inconclusively.

  Maria Kochetkova (San Francisco Ballet) fared better with Jorma Elo's “One Overture” (to music by Biber and Mozart) in which classical steps kept disintegrating into modernistic spasms and body-squiggles without disturbing the remarkable sense of flow that is a hallmark of Russian classical training. And Olga Malinovskaya (Estonia National Ballet) made the most of surely the strangest repertory selection: George Balanchine's sweet, neoclassical Glinka Pas de Trois (with Stashkevich and Vyacheslav Lopatin). Whatever its stylistic incongruity Thursday,  this formal 1955 divertissement filled the stage with dancing: a blessed relief after so many constricted premieres.

A retrospective: Los Angeles Ballet turns 5

Institutions are living beings with their own distinct energies and auras. Watching one appear, grow, stumble, recover and mature can be a fascinating spectacle.

I don't know anyone personally at Los Angeles Ballet, but when I was asked to write a five-year retrospective on the company, I found myself producing more of an advocacy piece than I had intended.

That surprised me.

I first watched Los Angeles Ballet as staff dance critic at The Times, reviewing its inaugural performances. But before that I reported on its formation and initial plans, along with those of two other ballet companies that failed to get off the ground.

I watch it now as a civilian, not uncritically but with an investment in years. In a way, I am part of its history. That doesn't make what I have to say important, but it is informed by seeing what a lot of other companies were dancing in the Southland during the same five years and balancing their achievements against those of this struggling, can-do local entity.

Click here to run my analysis of Los Angeles Ballet.

-- Lewis Segal

Photo: The Los Angeles Ballet 's February performance of "Serenade." Credit: Los Angeles Times.

 

Dance review: Tere O'Connor Dance in 'Wrought Iron Fog' at the REDCAT

There are moments at the REDCAT when the five members of Tere O'Connor Dance seem to be summarizing the history of their art. You can find pointed toes and courtly bows from the age of ballet, sassy hip-rolling and audience-courting out of  pop- and show-dancing, plus plenty of examples of nonlinear, postmodern abstraction.

But the biggest clue to the abundant secrets and questions of the hour-long piece that opened Thursday for a four-performance run comes from O'Connor's title: “Wrought Iron Fog.” On a stage framed with strands of rope or twine that can look solid or transparent depending on the lighting effects of Michael O'Connor,  we are clearly at the intersection of body and spirit.

A New York-based choreographer with 35 works to his credit and nearly as many awards,  O'Connor has spoken of  “the coexistence of fixed states and constant change” as one element in this piece. A key statement of this concept comes in a solo near the end for Matthew Rogers, alternately freezing in poses as rigid and decorative as wrought iron, then swirling away into passages as flowing and evanescent as mist. His fingers rippling, his long, blond hair creating a kind of sea spray around him, Rogers liquefies for moments at a time, then reclaims his finite physicality for weighty turning jumps.
 
It's a powerful example of self-definition, like the one that finds Hilary Clark backing away from a group frieze, then suddenly and gracelessly falling. But Clark rises from this awkward “accident” into the most solemn and majestic dancing of the evening -- pure and perfectly controlled.

“Wrought Iron Fog” teems with such personal events, many of them offering tantalizing emotional implications, though no narrative resolutions. For instance, Heather Olson and Daniel Clifton link up quietly and discreetly more than once, but the relationship between Rogers and Erin Gerken grows increasingly turbulent, with her literally throwing herself at him and on him near the end of the piece, an assault that she seems to regret when she withdraws from the encounter.

Dance review: Diavolo meets John Adams at the Hollywood Bowl

Since its formation in 1992, the Diavolo ensemble has used portable architectural units to create movement theater about our relationship to an unstable environment. Artistic director Jacques Heim has sent his fearless performers plunging off a rocking platform, bursting out of trapdoors inside a staircase, scrambling over fast-evolving pyramids and hanging onto wheels of every possible size at every possible height and angle.

To say Diavolo is exciting is redundant -- the question is always whether there's anything deeper than the high-risk gymnastics and advanced theater technology on view. The answer was mostly yes at Hollywood Bowl on Thursday when this Los Angeles-based company premiered “Fearful Symmetries,” a major collaboration commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as the second installment of a projected Diavolo trilogy that began with “Foreign Bodies” three years ago.

The 10 cast members proved brilliant at making precisely coordinated feats look improvisational, even reckless -- but, at their freest, they remained under the thumb of two master manipulators (not counting Heim). One was Adam Davis, who designed the giant cube that became the focus of the piece. This mysterious structure held all sorts of hidden panels, apertures and crevices, but quickly opened up  to evoke a whole cityscape, then divided into rectangular platforms that became everything from towers to surfboards. (Mike McCluskey and others engineered the unit.)

Even more dominant in “Fearful Symmetries”: the 1988 score of the same name by John Adams -- an intricate, churning and often threatening showpiece that challenged Heim and the cast to match its scale and intensity. Even those of us who saw preview showings of the work weren't prepared for the way conductor Bramwell Tovey and the Philharmonic asserted Adams' fierce authority on Thursday. And by failing to embody the darkness in the music, parts of the last third of the Diavolo performance looked arbitrary and insufficient.

Before those lapses, however, acts of collective and individual heroism fused with the music in ways at once startling and uplifting -- Omar Olivas leaping across tilting precipices; Trevor Harrison avoiding obstacles with one dynamic flip after another; Garrett Wolf fighting for survival inside an imploding cubicle; Shauna Martinez forcing the whole set to pivot open for her as if breaching the gates of hell.

Watching them, did we think of 9/11, Katrina, the firestorm in San Bruno? Why not? The best moments in “Fearful Symmetries” showed a familiar landscape suddenly becoming dangerous and people forced by an  unexpected loss of control to discover new capabilities and relationships. In form, the piece depicted a search -- one that initially focused on the cube, with Diavolo exploring inside, outside, above and below it. By the end, even the ground had opened, forming new plateaus and canyons to be investigated, and the search continued with no cube in sight.

The Bavarian town of Oberammergau remounts its singular Passion Play

With its picturesque houses painted with Gospel scenes and its imposing Alpine vistas, Oberammergau has atmosphere galore -- but the rain was coming down so hard when I arrived a few weeks ago that my feet were soaked by the time I ran to the theater and took my seat for the first part of the town's Passion Play. It is famously performed every decade as a promise to God, in an outdoor theater large enough to hold 4,700 -- almost the size of the entire population of the small German village

I don't speak German, but I'd been e-mailed a translation of the current text by PR representative Frederik Mayet -- who also plays Jesus. And I'd also read the 1900 version (widely available in paperback) plus the revision used after Vatican II.

So I was ready, but I didn't expect the extreme fluidity of the staging -- the way hundreds of people would suddenly surge into view, forming dynamic panoramas and just as suddenly disappear backstage. These people may not be performers nine years out of 10, but this play is their birthright and they leave nothing to chance.  But this was not the version that Hitler once approved of.

To read my full article on Oberammergau and how the play has confronted its history, click here.

-- Lewis Segal

Photo: Jesus prays on the Mount of Olives during the Passion Play. Credit: Passion Play Oberammergau 2010

Dance review: Merce Cunningham's 'Roaratorio' at Disney Hall

A lot of people in contemporary dance feel secretly relieved that choreographer Merce Cunningham is no longer around. Yes, yes, Cunningham, who died July 2009 at age 90, was a beloved father-figure and mentor in the modern dance world. But through his restless creativity and pioneering experiments with dance structure, space, sequencing, collaboration, video, computers and motion-capture technology, he had a way of making everyone else's work look conservative and back-dated.

It's infinitely easier to pay tribute to such a master than compete with him -- or, sometimes, to experience the outer reaches of his art.

Case in point: the brand-new reconstruction of his “Roaratorio” this weekend in Walt Disney Concert Hall. Part of an ambitious two-year “Legacy Tour” before the Merce Cunningham Dance Company disbands, this hour-long piece from 1983 had originally been performed in only a handful of engagements and not seen in nearly a quarter-century. Could it still be a challenge, an adventure, a new angle on the unorthodox splendor of Cunningham dancing?  It could -- but also arguably is an exasperating problem.

Twenty-seven years ago, it represented an unusual Cunningham project because it used a preexisting score: John Cage's epic “Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake,” which incorporated Cage's reading of a radically manipulated text derived from James Joyce's  novel, plus the performances of Irish musicians and more than 2,000 taped sound effects recorded in places mentioned by Joyce. A vast Irish soundscape of extraordinary power and even ferocity, it was played and mixed live at the Cunningham performances, with Cage and the musicians adding their energies and activities to the event.

At Disney Hall on Friday, however, a multi-track recording left the words submerged, the Irish music only fitfully evident and the sound effects relentlessly dominant. Worse, under these circumstances the score as a whole seemed generalized -- a loop of titanic, orgasmic murk -- against which 15 dancers moving in purposeful, circumspect patterns appeared hopelessly minuscule.

Movie review: 'Dancing Across Borders,' a Cambodian ballet

In a mere 88 minutes, “Dancing Across Borders” tells several overlapping stories engagingly. It focuses on Sokvannara (Sy) Sar, a teenager in 2000 when he was spotted by arts philanthropist and filmmaker Anne Bass doing Cambodian folk dances near the great Khmer ruins of Angkor Wat.

The documentary is in one sense a validation of Bass’ belief that Sy had the makings of a major ballet dancer — though he had never seen ballet at the time.

Drawing on home-video footage, news clips, recently shot interviews and other sources, most of the film is devoted to charting Sy’s development in Western classicism, and as we listen to Olga Kostritzky — his esteemed teacher and coach — we see deeply into the challenges that every fledgling ballet dancer must face on the road to prowess. Other major voices include Jock Soto of New York City Ballet and Peter Boal, now artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle.

Abundant dance excerpts provide both entertainment and evidence of Sy’s progress. But soon, as he becomes a returning hero in Cambodia and then a corps member at Pacific Northwest Ballet, the film illustrates a larger issue: the difficulties immigrants must face everywhere in holding onto their heritage while succeeding in an entirely new set of circumstances.

Dance review: Joffrey's 'Cinderella' at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

Back in 1948, before he was acknowledged as one of  the century's greatest dance-makers, Frederick Ashton left nothing to chance when choreographing “Cinderella,” his first full-length work for the British company now known as the Royal Ballet.

He began with a beloved fairy tale like the one that inspired the 19th century Russian classic “The Sleeping Beauty,” then added comic elements from traditional British Christmas shows (a.k.a. pantomimes) with their outrageous female characters played by men in drag. Next, challenging the technical prowess of his company,  Ashton piled on so much intricate, dazzling bravura for everyone from subsidiary women to principals that the result emerged brilliantly, even defiantly neoclassic.

The Joffrey Ballet faced these challenges with impressive energy and style Thursday in the first of five performances of ”Cinderella” (through Sunday afternoon) at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. And the company's achievement proved even more remarkable because it conspicuously lacked a key element that Ashton counted on in his original production: a reigning international ballerina in the title role and ballet celebrities (including Ashton himself) as the ugly stepsisters.

So values shifted. “Cinderella” became less of a star vehicle, and the stepsisters, in particular, grew less endearing in their endless attempts to be farcically appalling. But the pattern of the ballet emerged in high relief, frequently at odds with the flow of Sergei Prokofiev's dark, sardonic score but often startlingly imaginative in movement invention.