Dance review: American Ballet Theatre premieres 'Firebird' in O.C.

With his characteristic blend of sensitive classicism and impish humanity, choreographer Alexei Ratmansky has updated the iconic “Firebird” into an extravagant and fanciful adventure for American Ballet Theatre. 

The one-act ballet had its world premiere Thursday at Segerstrom Center for the Arts on an abundant triple bill that also featured the local premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s “Thirteen Diversions” (2011) and “Duets” (1980) by the late Merce Cunningham.

PHOTOS: 'Firebird' at the American Ballet Theatre

It was “Firebird,” however, that was most anticipated, both for its theatrical significance and for Ratmansky’s past successes in re-envisioning the Russian repertory. Choreographer Michel Fokine’s 1910 original –- sometimes called an anti-classical ballet for its then-unorthodox steps and costumes, and for Igor Stravinsky’s masterful score -– was one of the glory productions of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. 

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.

Distinguished dancers and companies celebrate Donald McKayle

Matthew Rushing and Renee Robinson, stars of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, joined local students and a cast of other celebrated dancers in a concert Thursday night to pay tribute to the art and life of Donald McKayle.

Rushing and Robinson kicked off the UC Irvine-organized event at the Irvine Barclay Theatre with an excerpt from McKayle’s “Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder,” a seminal modern dance work about the wasted lives and crushed dreams of men on a chain gang.  McKayle, an active 81-year-old, was a distinguished professor in the UCI dance department for two decades. He still directs the university’s dance company, Etude Ensemble, which performed the premiere of his latest piece, “The Americas: North and South,” for the show.

PHOTOS: Donald McKayle, a dance career

In welcoming remarks, director Debbie Allen called McKayle “one of the great choreographers and delightful human beings.” McKayle was her teacher at the American Dance Festival, where he was, she said, “the tallest and most handsome man I’d ever met in a pair of tights. He wore us out … but he made us laugh.”

He later launched her career in “Raisin,” the Tony-winning musical that he choreographed and directed. Predating today's crossover choreographers, McKayle worked in musical theater, television and film, adding to his renown as a creator of significant modern dance pieces, such "Games."

Spring dance preview: Ballet Preljocaj, Savion Glover

The dance season picks up steam with some tantalizing "firsts": Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève makes its debut appearance and introduces Los Angeles to works by Benjamin Millepied of "Black Swan" fame, who is artistic director at L.A. Dance Project. In addition, American Ballet Theatre premieres a new production of "The Firebird" by one of the world's most exciting choreographers, Alexei Ratmansky. 

Here's a look ahead at these and other notable dance engagements this spring:

Ballet Preljocaj

 French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj answers to an eclectic -- some might even say fickle -- muse. Since establishing Ballet Preljocaj in 1984, he has given audiences a dystopian “Romeo and Juliet” on the one hand, and an abstract “Helikopter,” with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s noisy quartet for helicopters as a score, on the other hand. The company’s upcoming Los Angeles performances highlight a well-known story in “Snow White” (2008). But this being Preljocaj, and with costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier and a score culled from Mahler, don’t expect Disney. (For ages 12 and older.)

Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. 7:30 p.m. March 23-24, 2 p.m. March 25. $28-$110. www.musiccenter.org

Savion Glover

The boy wonder of Broadway’s “The Tap Dance Kid” and “Black and Blue” has matured into Savion the inscrutable artist, often dancing with head bowed. His unquenchable thirst to explore tap dancing as percussive sound goes on. In “Bare Soundz,” he explores flamenco rhythms. Glover is always mindful of tap dancing’s roots and the hoofers who came before him, and he pays tribute in this show to the late Gregory Hines.

Valley Performing Arts Center, California State University, Northridge, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge. 8 p.m. March 24. $25-$70. www.valleyperformingartscenter.org

Dance review: 'Cleopatra, CEO' by Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre

 

The 51st floor penthouse suite at 515 S. Flower St., the site of Heidi Duckler’s latest dance-theater piece, “Cleopatra, CEO,” is a scenic design come true for the Los Angeles choreographer.

 

At “Cleopatra’s” premiere over the weekend, audiences were guided through dance-theater scenes spread across 30,000 square feet of marble, burnished wood, beige carpeting, exquisite cabinetry and executive boardrooms with floor-to-ceiling windows, and one with a fireplace.

What more could a site-specific artist want than these rambling hallways and power chambers — once the opulent headquarters for oil corporation Atlantic Richfield — as settings for seduction, legislative mischief, war and suicide? 

PHOTOS: "Cleopatra, CEO"

For the most part, Duckler unleashed her imagination for a poetic riff on events from Cleopatra's life and mythology. Johanna Sapakie, a charismatic Cleopatra, climbed atop the furniture and upon the shoulders of her servants while yards and yards of fabric unfurled across the chamber. Greek attendants, with clipboards attached to their paddles, “rowed” their stationary boats (two stone secretary cubicles). The battle between Greeks and Romans for control of the ancient world was a mad dash through a hallway, while viewers pressed against the walls.

Los Angeles Dance Festival to debut in a busy April

With the goal of highlighting local dance, Diavolo Dance Theater and Brockus Project are co-producing a new Los Angeles Dance Festival, April 14 and 15, at the Brewery Arts Complex just east of downtown.

So far, 16 contemporary dance companies have signed up to participate, including Barak Marshall’s dance company, Oni Dance, Kybele Dance Theater and Lula Washington Dance Theatre. Deborah Brockus, artistic director of Brockus Project, said she is awaiting word from several other groups.

“What I want to do with this festival is somewhat similar to the American Dance Festival in North Carolina,” said Brockus, speaking of the annual summer event that is an international leader for dance training of college students, and for presenting and commissioning contemporary work.  For the Los Angeles Dance Festival, “the companies are all going to be doing open classes in the day, and then there are performances in the evening.”

The classes will take place in Brockus Project’s two studios at the Brewery Arts Complex on Moulton Avenue, and the performances will be at Diavolo’s studio space, also at the Brewery, which can seat as many as 150. If the Saturday performance sells out, a later second show would be added, Brockus said. She based her selection on "strong working companies that tour to different places."

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.

Movie review: 'Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance'

Ballet has become so culturally irrelevant that people need to be reminded that a century ago it was cutting-edge contemporary art, enlisting the titans of the age in choreography, music and design. Robert Joffrey loved the groundbreaking works of that era and not only revived and reconstructed them for his own company (founded in the late 1950s), but embraced and updated their guiding aesthetic.

His story and that of his partner Gerald Arpino is retold in the 82-minute documentary “Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance” through the reminiscences of former Joffrey Ballet dancers and associates. There’s a lot of valuable information here, but for all the archival footage on view, dance is rarely allowed to make its effect. It's nearly always shackled to voice-over commentary or dismembered by nervous editing. If “Ballets Russes” and the recent “Pina” made you understand the speakers’ enthusiasm, this film makes you take an awful lot of gush on faith.

Directed by Bob Hercules, the film will have its Los Angeles premiere on Wednesday at 8 p.m. in the Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School downtown. A VOD/DVD/digital release is planned for June.

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

Inside the dancing life in Los Angeles

Being a concert dancer takes equal parts talent, skill, and perseverance, particularly in Los Angeles. But ballet and modern dancers say the artistic opportunities are worth it, despite the city’s primary focus on the movie and television business. 

It takes grit to succeed, however. Chisa Yamaguchi, a member of Diavolo Dance Theater, recalled that when she started going out on auditions after getting her bachelor’s degree from UCLA, she was unprepared for just how competitive the process was. She had to learn to steel herself not just for rejections, but for the cut-throat environment.

 “At first, it was really difficult to be happy for the people who were getting the jobs I wanted,” she said. “The audition where they [Diavolo] hired me, was the one audition that I helped people who asked me for help. You need to look at people not as competition but as assets. We need to stick together otherwise we are going to all fail.”

Read the stories of Yamaguchi and other Los Angeles dancers

-- Laura Bleiberg

Photo: Chisa Yamaguchi in "Origin," by Diavolo Dance Theater. Credit: Thomas Vu