Archive for November, 2006
LaDiego Dance Theater presented Nutcracker—Land of the Sweets on Saturday night, November 18th, choreographed by Daniel Marshall (LaDiego Artistic Director and Founder), Aliyah Hassan, and Natasha Ridley. The Educational Cultural Complex in downtown San Diego was packed — all 275 seats were filled and additional seating had to be added in the back.
This was a completely reinvented Nutcracker, with music by Duke Ellington rather than Tchaikovsky. LaDiego’s Nutcracker is a modernized, bluesy reinvention of the late–19th century ballet, and provided a thoroughly enjoyable evening of dance.
The LaDiego Dance Theater Nutcracker creates a wonderful 1940s and 1950s nightclub atmosphere, reminiscent of Harlem’s Apollo Theater and the legendary Cotton Club. A full-scale ballet, presented in two acts, LaDiego’s Nutcracker delighted the lucky audience with more than a dozen wildly diverse pieces.
The panoply of dance styles included classical ballet, jazz ballet, tap dancing, swing dancing, and Arabian Nights set pieces. Several of the ballet sequences included terrific partner work. Several of the jazz sequences included very difficult allegro sections, often with triple counts (“and-a-one”) extended for eight measures or more.
Nutcracker—Land of the Sweets opened with a nightclub party scene, and the dancers conveyed a real sense of party. This is one of many great things about LaDiego Dance Theater. LaDiego dancers have a strong sense of what they’re doing on stage. You don’t see them “acting” — they simply inhabit their characters, and the result is believable performances.
And, delightfully, most of these dancers have extraordinary charisma and theatrical instincts. The range of technical ability varies, yet everyone is dancing full-out and having tremendous fun. LaDiego dancers know how to put on a show.
A few words about technique — LaDiego Dance Theater puts dancers with varied skill levels on stage at the same time, a remarkable method I’ve never seen elsewhere. Dancers with only a handful of years of training are thrown into the deep end of the pool, and the result is fast-forward on-the-job training. And, owing to the skill of the choreographers and artistic director, the dances are seamless, inventive, and highly entertaining.
Overall, the company technique is thrilling. If they were in New York, the three principal dancers, Aliyah Hassan, Danika Pramik-Holdaway, and Natasha Ridley, could all be members of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. Likewise, the LaDiego men are very strong. Justin White, Vincent Hardy, and the guest artists, Aaron Ellis and Jason Marks, performed with boldness and vigor, and all were excellent partners. And, of course, there is the electrifying Daniel Marshall.
Soloists Taylor Hogg and Liz Mantalas, and company dancers Lindsey Bach, Stephanie Breining, April Cortes, Lucy Duck, Sulijah Learmont, Lauren Pasqual, and Jenny Peterson all performed beautifully and well. LaDiego dancers are musical dancers with great stage presence.
LaDiego Dance Theater is all about dance theater. When I watch this company perform, I see an embodiment of two of New York’s greatest jazz dance troupes, the Fred Benjamin Dance Company and the George Faison Dance Company. When word would go out that one of these companies was planning to have a season, the entire New York dance world took notice.
I’m very happy to witness this tradition being continued. Well-trained dancers reveling in the joy of dance, skilled performers having so much fun and creating terrific drama at the same time. Choreography that uses the whole stage, set to music that makes you want to jump out of your seat. Powerful emotion, the highs and lows of human experience, and the thrill of being alive. These qualities make great dance theater great.
LaDiego Dance Theater is traveling this noble road.
November 26th, 2006
Last Tuesday night I had the extraordinary good fortune to attend 4X4, presented by Sushi Performance and Visual Art at the Bluefoot Bar and Lounge in North Park (downtown San Diego).
This wildly thrilling rollercoaster ride was the second in a projected monthly series of 4X4 performance events at Bluefoot. More than 120 dance/theater/performance art fans crowded into Bluefoot’s back room. It was like a rave, but with structure. 
People were standing three deep at the edges of the room. I felt like I was at the Lapin Agile in Montmartre on a particularly busy night. Attention was rapt, everyone drinking in the vibrating shared energy between the performers and the audience. For me, this 4X4 evening was one of those life-affirming moments.
Eight acts were presented (I say “acts” because they weren’t all dance). In addition to the creativity, inventiveness, and showmanship each performer brought to the very small stage, the overriding quality was bravery. All performers need a healthy dose of courage, and yet performing on a four-foot by four-foot stage with audience members a mere two feet away (truly redefining up-close-and-personal) requires courage of a wholly new variety.
4X4 defines in-your-face performing. Exhilarating. Exciting. Intimate. Personal-in-the-extreme.
And, of course, there are the radical performance requirements and technical considerations of developing a piece capable of being done on such a micro-stage. There’s physical danger, too. The stage is narrow, with tight borders. There are no flies, no off-stage area. You’re on the stage, or you’re falling off the edge. All the performers succeeded beautifully in this way — everyone managed the space and made the extreme restrictions work. These were bravura performances.
Sadie Weinberg presented “Boxing the Female”, choreographed by Terry Wilson. “Boxing the Female” is a gorgeous, fully realized work, very much like a Chopin etude. But this was an etude on steroids — a very big statement on a very little stage. This jazzy piece, backed by a liquid, electronic score, ranged over a wide vocabulary of double contractions, high extensions, geometric sequences, and running-in-place. I was reminded of an apocalyptic “Run, Lola, Run”. Sadie utilized every inch of the available space, creating a superb three-dimensional dance.
Victoria Robertson presented pretty much a single-act multimedia show. She stepped onto the 4×4 stage dressed in a beautiful kimono, gracefully disheveled, and began to vocalize. Arpeggios, runs, octave shifts, throat-clearings, water-sipping — a typical early morning vocal warm-up for a professional singer. Vocalizing continued while Victoria put on her makeup. This was all very fun, and there was much more to come. She peeled off her robe, in a low-key striptease, revealing a stunning little red dress. Red, of course, is the color of Carmen, and that’s exactly what Victoria proceeded to sing. The famous Carmen aria. On a proscenium, in a full Carmen production, the character teases the men as she sings, caressing them with her scarf or shawl. Victoria gave us a full-on Carmen, flirting with the men lucky enough to be seated nearby. Very nearby. This was performance art of the highest order, presented on a teeny stage of the smallest order. Heroic. Magnificent.
Alicia Peterson was a beautiful blonde in a lavender cocktail dress. And, as the third act, she gave us an early demonstration of how to engage with an audience that is literally in the performer’s face. The dancer performed lovely, lyrical choreography, her character sensual yet wistful, a woman hopeful of connecting in a meaningful way with a new, as-yet-unmet man. This was an intimate performance in a very intimate setting, and succeeded with grace and tremendous courage.
The stunningly successful evening concluded with the suave, urbane, and uproariously funnly Renowned Choregrapher Correspondence course presented by George Willis. There was even a quasi-”checklist” handout so the audience could follow along and self-test their knowledge of tempo, lighting, and staging. Wonderful, witty satire.
I thank the Sushi Performance and Visual Art brain trust for cooking-up this wonderful event, and I particularly thank the owners of the Bluefoot Bar and Lounge for saying “yes” to Sushi and having the vision (and terrific business savvy) to host this brilliant series of performances.
I can’t wait for the next 4×4, which will be on December 12th.
November 19th, 2006
On Saturday night, October 21st, I attended Auction 2006, presented by the Museum of Latin American Art. The event was held at MOLAA’s beautiful building in downtown Long Beach, CA, a gleaming alabaster structure of inspiration and transformation.
The event itself was terrific, attended by almost 1000 art lovers and collectors. The museum achieved a new standard — Auction 2006 reached the goal of $1,000,000 in proceeds.
The collection offered a marvelous diversity of style and subject matter, and included sculpture as well as paintings.
Panorama 2 (2003) by Patricia van Dalen, is a mixed-media collage on canvas. This strikingly original representation of timeless and fractured time is compelling and captivating. Panorama 2 could serve as the meditative focus for an endless inquiry into the origin of life.
Mi Calle Bella (2006) by Ricardo A. González is a gorgeous invitation to fun, a stunning Shakespearean proscenium opening onto a snow-capped vista. This delightful storytelling composition rewards close inspection, each repeat viewing revealing an undiscovered secret.
Sin Titulo (2004) by Manuel Espinoza presents a writhing landscape, a countryside alive with movement and energy.
Overall, I experienced a strong desire to learn much more about the numerous Latin American artists represented in the MOLAA collection. My ignorance of the activities of these talented and innovative contemporary artists could be remediated, in part, by paying attention and taking an active interest in this vibrant sector of the art world.
November 13th, 2006
I attended the opening-night performance of IMAGO moves at the gorgeous Molli and Arthur Wagner Dance Building at UC San Diego. IMAGO moves presented Garden Trilogy.
Yolande Snaith, Artistic Director of IMAGO moves, is an award-winning choreographer for the stage and film, and created the choreography for Stanley Kubrick’s terrific film, Eyes Wide Shut.
The first piece, Ghost Garden, was a thrilling, complex, fully formed work that succeeded on many levels, reminding me of the best that dance can be. In fact, and before I read the program note that mentioned the Kubrick film, I had the strong notion of cinematic choreography, and I don’t think I’d ever had that impression or experience before.
Film, of course, is a collaborative medium. And, film is very much like opera — the costumes, the sets, the lighting, the detailed story, the score, and the actors/singers/dancers combine to provide a rich sensory experience for the viewer. Ghost Garden was like this.
Cinematic choreography. Visual choreography. Dancing that stimulates, dancing that makes you think, dancing that causes new associations to form in your brain. Ghost Garden presented a series of novel images, scenes that were both archetypal and future-directed. In one unique sequence, prompted by the choreography, I imagined Sir Walter Raleigh and his ladies playing cosmic croquet using Star Wars light sabres as mallets.
The dancers were stupendous. In Ghost Garden the four women and two men presented grace, beauty, intelligence, and sensuality. Sensual, graceful intelligence. That’s a hot combination.
The four women, Alison Dietterle Smith, Erica Nordin, Raffaella Judd, and Sadie Weinberg, demonstrated marvelous technique. Long legs and arms, clean, tight turns, beautifully pointed feet, strong extensions, wonderful balance, and full dance vocabularies in both allegro and adagio sections.
The two men, John Diaz and Robby Johnson, were excellent partners and provided supplementary masculine focus and energy.
All six dancers demonstrated deep musicality, filling out the phrases consistently and completely. All dancers performed with joy, dedication, and attention to stagecraft, quietly reveling in their training and muscularity, reveling in their bodies-as-machines.
The costumes and sets were extremely interesting and provocative, heightening the imaginative rewards of the lucky viewers.
Cinematic choreography. All theatrical elements contributing to a fully realized creation. A stage continually filled with stimulating activity, not necessarily spread across the stage but occurring at discrete corners and places of visual power.
Ghost Garden is dance theater of the highest order.
November 1st, 2006
