Yvonne Mounsey, bringing Ballanchine to the Westside

During much of her celebrated career as a ballerina, which included performing with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and Colonel W. de Basil’s Original Ballet Russe, Yvonne Mounsey never imagined one day becoming a teacher.

“I was a dreamer and only wanted to dance. I thought of teaching as just saying ‘first position’ over and over again,” she says.

PHOTO GALLERY: Yvonne Mounsey and Westside Ballet's "The Nutcracker"

But working with George Balanchine during her decade as a dancer with New York City Ballet prompted Mounsey to rethink the vicissitudes of teaching. “Balanchine made you do this footwork that was about precision and attack, and I’d been in the company a couple of years before I got it,” she recalls. “He said to me one day, ‘Now you know what to do with your feet,' and I saw all those little details that went into my getting the footwork, with the heel coming forward and the toe going back.”

Discovering that teaching “came naturally,” Mounsey went on to co-found the Santa Monica-based Westside School of Ballet and pre-professional Westside Ballet company in 1967. For 39 years she has staged an annual production of “The Nutcracker." And she has also successfully channeled the Balanchine aesthetic of musicality and precision in her training of generations of students, many of whom continued on to professional careers in a number of ballet companies.

“Yvonne really brings the Balanchine technique and spirit to Westside Ballet,” says Rachel Schwartz, 16, who has studied at the school for 11 years. “It’s the way she teaches footwork, the way her hands curve. She’ll say, ‘This is the way Balanchine did it,’ and it’s so amazing to learn from her since she had firsthand experience with him.”

Diavolo looks at skateboarding for dance inspiration

Jacques Heim doesn’t mind that his dancers call him Napoleon. “Yes, that’s my nickname,” he says with a chuckle. “But the reason I push my dancers so hard is that I believe in them more than they believe in themselves. I will push them farther than what they think their limit is.”

Heim’s intense and rigorous rehearsal methods have definitely paid off for Diavolo, the choreographer’s almost 20-year-old Los Angeles-based company that has over a dozen works in its current repertoire, travels all over the world and has earned Heim prestigious commissions, such as his choreography for the Cirque du Soleil show “Ka.”

And now Los Angeles audiences will have an opportunity to view the nuts and bolts of Heim’s choreographic process during a first time artist-in-residency program starting Nov. 12 at the Music Center, where Diavolo members will inhabit the venue’s outdoor plaza to rehearse their latest work “Transit Space.” They''ll also be working along with some young skateboarders.

Read about Diavolo, skateboarding and the Music Center residency

“Some of the things I do in a rehearsal might seem random but everything I do has a meaning,” says Heim. “Sometimes this means I give my company specific guidance about a metaphor and other times, I want them to make something happen and I’ll tell them they need to fix whatever isn’t working. This has been my approach for over 17 years and I’ve seen fantastic changes in my performers.”

Miguel Gutierrez, finding a path outside the mainstream

New York-born choreographer Miguel Gutierrez spent the early part of his career performing in San Francisco as a member of the Joe Goode Performance Group. Eventually, he returned to the East Coast, convinced his best chance for success existed in New York. “I wanted access to an international audience and New York was the best gateway,” he says.

Now 40, Gutierrez, who lives in Brooklyn, has never regretted his decision. Since 2001, when he started creating his own works with a group of collaborators under the name Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, he has steadily gained recognition both nationally and internationally. Working in New York City, however, has its pros and cons, especially for convention-defying contemporary dance artists, says the choreographer, who will make his Los Angeles debut this weekend at the Alexandria Hotel.

On one hand, New York “has these formalist legacies that I find really interesting,” he says of all the famous modern dance choreographers from Martha Graham onward who made their home in the city. “But those same legacies are what’s burdening New York. You’ve got these false binaries of uptown and downtown dance, mainstream and experimental.”

Gutierrez, for example, often gets labeled as a performance artist because he creates work that explores existential and philosophical ideas through dance, text and song and “this drives me crazy.  I’m like ‘No, I’m a dancer. I get annoyed when my work is relegated to the outside of dance,” he says. “And it’s just this endless problem, not just in New York, but in America in general of being considered fringe. You always have to say my work is ‘downtown’ or ‘experimental.’ You can’t just say it’s dance. It’s so tedious.”

Dancing with wheelchairs

When she created her dance “Dust” with members of Axis Dance Company, choreographer Victoria Marks immediately noticed “how comfortable the dancers were with each other and how comfortable I felt with them. I never encountered any limitations as a choreographer because I didn’t have a set vision of what the dance should be. The dancers and I built a world together,” she says.

Founded in 1987 as a company dedicated to physically integrated dance, which is performed by dancers with and without disabilities, Axis found a winning formula in inviting Marks and other accomplished modern dance choreographers to create works for its repertory. As its website duly notes, Axis’ list of collaborators, which includes Bill T. Jones, Meredith Monk and Stephen Petronio, reads like a “Who’s Who of Contemporary Dance.” Its transformation into a respected repertory ensemble “completely changed what we were doing and how we thought of ourselves,” says Judith Smith, Axis’ artistic director, who pushed for the company to work with outside choreographers in 1997.

As a result, Axis, which will perform excerpts of its repertory at the Ford Amphitheater in Los Angeles on July 9, gained substantially more attention from critics “who had a way in to our work that they didn’t have before. They could say that they liked some of our pieces and not others instead of just writing about how inspiring we are or approaching our work only from a human interest angle,” says Smith.

The making of Mark Morris' 'L'Allegro'

Early on in his career, choreographer Mark Morris spent three formative years as director of dance for the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brusssels, Belgium. Granted ample funding and a well-equipped building, he also confronted a great deal of criticism from the local dance establishment that questioned why an American choreographer resided at the helm of Belgium’s national opera house. In this environment, he wound up creating some of his best known and critically acclaimed work: “The Hard Nut,” “Dido and Aeneas” and “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.”

“I didn’t enjoy living in Belgium but I had a fabulous experience,” recalls the 54-year-old choreographer during a phone interview. “It was the first time I could do these gigantic, thrilling projects with my company.”

In particular, “L’Allegro,” which will be performed by the Mark Morris Dance Group next week at the Music Center with live music by L.A. Opera, has been widely lauded as one of Morris’ greatest works. Creating the dance back in 1988, however, definitely had its arduous moments.

“It was very difficult to make, both for me and my company,” says Morris, preferring not to elaborate further on that period of his life. “Anything else I say about that time in Brussels will then be the key for people trying to understand the piece and I don’t want that.”

June Omura, a veteran Mark Morris dancer, recalls that time in Brussels “as an amazing adventure. Mark knew the music so well that his choreography came out faster than most human beings could put up with,” she says. “If you lost your concentration for a second, you were called out. Looking back, that was one of the most intense and hardest rehearsal periods.”

For Omura, who will be dancing in the Music Center production, “L’Allegro” has turned out “to be the most rewarding show I’ve ever been in. The dance evokes these different states of mind and emotion. As a dancer, you’ve been through a lot by the time you come to the joyous finale.”

Ultimately, “L’Allegro” is about being a human with other humans,” says Maile Okamura, who joined Morris’ company in 2001. “And I love that this piece has stayed with us. The beauty of it is that you can age with it and experience it with different people who you dance with over the years.”

To read more about the Mark Morris Dance Group, click here.

--Susan Josephs

Photo: Choreographer Mark Morris is seen at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, NY. Credit: Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

Battle of the Dance, sort of a Medieval Times with a stomp and a shimmy

 

Before launching his latest business venture, dinner-theater mogul Andres Gelabert studied the demographics of Southern California and concluded that “this is the best place” to put on a show featuring international styles of dance. “You can reach 24 million people here,” he says. “You have tourists but you also have so many people who live here who are really from somewhere else.”

Perhaps best known as the founder of the Medieval Times dinner theaters, Gelabert has brought a new act to Orange County. Called Battle of the Dance and located prominently on Anaheim’s Harbor Boulevard (it’s hard to miss the strobe-lighted accented sign), the 40,000-square-foot venue has hired some 200 employees and has been touted by its developers as a much-needed stimulant in a region still suffering from economic downturn. With dance as its centerpiece and “battle” in its title, the dinner theater also seems to be counting on the art form’s continued prominence in the zeitgeist and popularity on television as a competitive spectacle.

Modeled after Gelabert’s Son Amar dinner theater show in Majorca, Spain, Battle of the Dance features troupes of Flamenco, Irish and Bollywood dancers with the versatility to also knock out pop-inflected jazz/contemporary dance numbers.

“It’s a great opportunity to expose people to all kinds of cultural and ethnic dance,” says Michelle Painter-Larson, one of the show’s choreographers and an Irish step dancing expert. “With our show, we want to create the feeling that we’re traveling around the world, picking up different types of dances.”

As with many in dance, Lucinda Childs finds inspiration from Merce Cunningham

When reflecting on her various teachers and mentors, choreographer Lucinda Childs seems especially indebted to Merce Cunningham. Becoming the late choreographer’s student, she says, swayed her from thoughts of pursuing an acting career. “I had been interested in acting, but there was so much that was demanded of you to be a good Cunningham dancer,” she says.

  The influence of Cunningham on Childs’ own illustrious career as a choreographer can clearly be spotted in “Dance,” her seminal 1979 work revived in 2009 that has been touring the U.S. and Europe. Coming to UCLA Live’s Royce Hall in May, “Dance” reflects Childs’ preoccupation with how repetitive movement sequences can lead to complex patterns and rhythms. But it also points to formative lessons about choreography that Childs learned specifically from Cunningham.

“My main interest was that it was valid to work with choreography without it having any narrative orientation, and this was controversial,” says Childs of her days as a student at Sarah Lawrence College and at Cunningham’s studio in the early 1960s. “Merce validated the idea that you could just be moving in space and doing beautiful combinations of movement that in and of itself have value.”

Spring arts preview: Performance and dance

A look ahead at the spring season in performance and dance.

Lemi Ponifasio/MAU

The Samoan-born, New Zealand-based choreographer and theater artist pays homage to Shakespeare and explores more contemporary ideas about personal freedom and political tyranny in his multimedia “TEMPEST: Without a Body.” Performed by Ponifasio's company MAU, the production, making its U.S. premiere at the historical Million Dollar Theater in downtown L.A. in collaboration with REDCAT, offers a potent and provocative blend of dance, theater and Polynesian ritual.

REDCAT at Million Dollar Theater, 307 S. Broadway, L.A. 8:30 p.m. April 2, 7 p.m. April 3. $30.
www.redcat.org

Barak Marshall
This has proved to be a great year for choreographer Barak Marshall, a native Angeleno of Israeli-Yemenite heritage who once served as the in-house choreographer for Israel's Batsheva Dance Company. In January, he won the $10,000 prize in the Joyce Theater Foundation's Los Angeles version of the A.W.A.R.D. Show!, a program where the audience vote helps fund new choreographic works. And now he's embarking on a North American tour of “Monger,” which will be presented at UCLA Live's Royce Hall. The dance-theater work, through hyper-physical movement, tells of a group of servants trapped in the house of an abusive mistress.

Royce Hall at UCLA, 340 Royce Drive, L.A. 8 p.m. April 15, 9 p.m. April 16. $28 to $48. www.uclalive.org

Cirque du Soleil's ‘Quidam'

One of Cirque du Soleil's darker, more poignant productions, “Quidam” has traveled the world since its Montreal premiere in 1996. Those who missed its 2006 appearance in Long Beach have another chance to see this signature show, which tells of Zoe, a little girl neglected by her parents who copes by delving into her own imaginary world. Cirque's globally successful formula of coupling a loose narrative structure with spectacular acrobatic acts is on full display in “Quidam,” where jump-ropes, swings, hoops and other children's toys become transformed into gravity-defying spectacles in the hands of acrobats, dancers and contortionists.

Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. 7:30 p.m. April 20 and 21, 3:30 and 7:30 p.m. April 22 and 23, 1 and 5 p.m. April 24. $40 to $120. www.cirquedusoleil.com/quidam


Mark Morris Dance Group

Often described as a choreographer devoted to musicality, Mark Morris can now take credit for a first-time collaboration between the Music Center and L.A. Opera when his “L' Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” takes the stage at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in celebration of his New York City-based company's 30th anniversary. Set to Handel's music and John Milton's poetry, the famous 1988 work will include 24 dancers, the L.A. Opera Orchestra, a quartet of opera singers and a scenic design inspired by William Blake's watercolors.

Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. 7:30 p.m. May 5-7, 2 p.m. Sunday, May 8. $30 to $120. www.musiccenter.org


Royal Danish Ballet
Founded in the 18th century and profoundly shaped by French Ballet master August Bournonville, this ballet company renowned for its rigorously precise footwork will be making a Southern California appearance for the first time in 15 years. Equally devoted to preserving Bournonville's legacy and showcasing works by contemporary choreographers, the company will give audiences a taste of both goals. Program 1 includes U.S. premieres of works by Nordic choreographers such as the Finnish-born Jorma Elo, while Program 2 features a new production of Bournonville's comic ballet “Napoli.”

Segerstrom Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 7:30 p.m. May 24-27, 2 and 7:30 p.m. May 28, 2 p.m. May 29. $17 and up. www.scfta.org

Out of town
Danza Contemporanea de Cuba

American audiences will have the unprecedented opportunity to see this esteemed Cuban dance troupe when it travels to the United States for the first time in a series of East Coast performances, including a two-week run at the Joyce Theater in New York. Established in 1959, this company has achieved international fame for its virtuosic fusions of Afro-Caribbean dance forms with classical ballet. And during its US tour, it will present works by the Swedish choreographer Mats Ek, Spanish choreographer Rafael Bonachela and Pedro Ruiz, a Cuban American and former dancer with Ballet Hispanico.

Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave., New York. 7:30 p.m. May 10-11 and 17-18, 8 p.m. May 12-13 and 19-20, 2 and 8 p.m. May 14 and 21, 2 and 7:30 p.m. May 15 and 22. $19-$75. www.joyce.org

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Lucinda Childs' 'Dance' heads to UCLA Live

-- Susan Josephs

Photo: “TEMPEST: Without a Body.” Credit: Lemi Ponifasio

'The A.W.A.R.D Show!' is the little dance competition that could

During the era in which Neta Pulvermacher produced "The A.W.A.R.D. Show!," every competing choreographer received the same prize for their participation: a miniature Statue of Liberty wearing a hand-sewn tutu. “I tried to create a situation where everyone wins,” she recalls. “And I wanted to remind people that the show was about expressing artistic freedom.”

But "The A.W.A.R.D. Show!" is also indisputably about competition, no matter how anyone spins it. Now produced in six U.S. cities by the Joyce Theater Foundation, the contest for the concert dance crowd comes to REDCAT starting Thursday night, where 12 contemporary choreographers will present their best 15-minute dances in the hopes of winning $10,000 to be used toward the creation of a new work. And in Los Angeles, which has a small and highly interconnected contemporary dance community, those competitive stakes become that much higher as choreographers who have known each other as friends and/or colleagues prepare to publicly compete against each other.

“It could be a popularity contest, where people could try to pack the house with their friends on the night they’re performing,” says Bradley Michaud, a participating choreographer in the Los Angeles show, who takes care to note that his fellow choreographers “agreed to market for each other” when sending out promotional materials.

Helios Dance Theater: finding romance in monsters and vampires

Throughout her childhood in Milwaukee, Laura Gorenstein Miller remained convinced that she lived in a haunted house. “My sisters and I would walk past certain rooms and we’d hear voices of women having a tea party,” she recalls. “Maybe that was our overactive imaginations but the important thing is that we believed it was real.”

As an adult, Gorenstein Miller has no trouble accessing her youthful convictions about the supernatural. A choreographer with a penchant for narrative and emotionally driven movement, she channeled old childhood memories and dreams into her latest work for Helios Dance Theater, “Beautiful Monsters.” Premiering at UCLA Live’s on Saturday, the multimedia dance delves into the different facets of the vampire myth and depicts seduction, romance, death and nightmarish dream states.

“There is something erotic about vampires. They seduce you, they charm you and they mesmerize you. That interested me from a dance making perspective,” says Gorenstein Miller, who founded her company in 1996.

Jam packed with high-energy, sensual movements, “Beautiful Monsters” reflects Gorenstein Miller’s ongoing fascination with “choreographic extremes. I love when a release movement and a held position bump up against each other in the same choreography. That always excites me,” she says. “But it requires a very skilled dancer and I always look for classically trained dancers who can release.”

Helios’ upcoming performance will mark the first time in over a decade that a Los Angeles-based contemporary dance company will appear at a UCLA Live program at Royce Hall.

“It’s a huge honor and a great opportunity,” says Gorenstein Miller, who hopes to counter perceptions about locally created dance seeming second-rate compared with works produced in New York or Europe. “We’re an L.A.-based company and personally, I don’t plan on ever moving to New York.”

To read more about Helios Dance Theater, click here.

-- Susan Josephs

Photo: Helios founder  Laura Gorenstein Miller watches as Chris Stanley and Sandra Chiu rehearse "Beautiful Monsters." Credit: Christina House / For The Times.