In the dance world, nobody makes a case for damaged heroes as brilliantly as Matthew Bourne. In his reworkings of classic stories and scores, the British director and choreographer invariabl…
What a difference a hashtag makes. When Los Angeles Ballet presented August Bournonville's two-act story ballet "La Sylphide" five years ago, the performance seemed an elegy to lost love and…
Count no man happy till he dies, the great Greek playwright Sophocles warned us in 429 BC " a perspective renewed often in the deliberately bleak, slow and dark movement-theater spectacle "T…
Can a classic be offensive? Certainly reactions to certain scripted narratives, from Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew" to D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" have changed with time and sen…
Continuity of tradition dominates the ballet world " and so does the new ways tradition can be embodied, reinterpreted and sometimes undermined year after year. Last performed in 2014, the L…
Call it a joyous homecoming. The national tour of Broadway's "An American in Paris" has opened at the Hollywood Pantages, returning the story, characters and George Gershwin music to the the…
Endurance, survival, getting through troubled times: The program that the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater presented at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Wednesday focused on crucial life l…
A bleak creative vision infused with scenic dazzle gave a distinctive edge to three works by young, New York-based choreographer Jonah Bokaer on Friday in Royce Hall at UCLA. Cold and dark, …
Memo to choreographer Alexei Ratmansky: Play Misty for me. Yes, everyone in the ballet world is aware that you're one of the artists defining the art, someone renowned or notorious - dependi…
Memo to choreographer Alexei Ratmansky: Play Misty for me. Yes, everyone in the ballet world is aware that you're one of the artists defining the art, someone renowned or notorious " dependi…
Visual splendor is a familiar and welcome component of the pieces created by Rosanna Gamson for her nine-dancer ensemble. Few Los Angeles choreographers use theater technology quite so disti…
Los Angeles Ballet's new production of Frederick Ashton's "Romeo and Juliet" is not only admirable. It's news. Ashton ranks among the three or four greatest ballet choreographers of the 20th…
The West Coast premiere of "The Art of Falling" brought to the Ahmanson Theatre on Friday night some uproarious sketch-comedy supplemented and occasionally eclipsed by first-rate contemporar…
The West Coast premiere of "The Art of Falling" brought to the Ahmanson Theatre on Friday night some uproarious sketch-comedy supplemented and occasionally eclipsed by first-rate contemporar…
Twyla Tharp once choreographed different recordings of Frank Sinatra singing "My Way" in the same piece. That double dose of self-aggrandizement should have prepared us for her 50th annivers…
From its first performances in 1958, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has championed overlapping social and creative agendas. Not all of them were evident in the four-part "Power of Ai…
Dancing through its first nine seasons, Los Angeles Ballet has bravely tackled one rite of passage after another " not merely the major Balanchine and Bournonville choreographies that are it…
Reflecting fast-evolving social and marital realities, the same-sex duet became a staple of new choreography on nearly every local dance stage in 2014, ranging from the dazzling partnering i…
Even if Benjamin Millepied never creates a dance worth seeing more than once, his L.A. Dance Project deserves high praise for attracting young audiences with contemporary works that challeng…
"Swan Lake" has been a work in progress ever since its first 1877 Moscow version (now lost), with each new generation adding to " and sometimes undermining " its evolving richness and depth.…
In an age of rampant ballet revisionism, finding an unorthodox "Swan Lake" isn't difficult. In Denmark there's one that depicts the life of Tchaikovsky. Germany offers a version that focuses…
Paul Taylor served the first generation of modern dance pioneers as a performer, then helped create and redefine the second as a choreographer.
Classic ballets change over time---sometimes radically. Take "Giselle," the antique, tragic two-act dance drama about a peasant girl driven mad by a nobleman but who rises from her grave to …
Lively and resourceful, with an unusual array of bright, painted backdrops adding to the Christmas cheer, "The Great Russian Nutcracker" came to the Wiltern Theatre on Sunday performed by th…
Matthew Bourne’s delirious remake of "The Sleeping Beauty," which opened Thursday at the Ahmanson Theatre, managed to leapfrog through time as magically as other major productions whil…