Anne Plamodon & Victor Quijada | Photo by Natalie Galazka Victor Quijada started dancing when he was a student at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, taking his first classes with postmodern dance pioneer Rudy Perez. Known as "Rubberband" in the clubs and streets of LA, he began breakdancing with the best and soon found himself dancing for Twyla Tharp, Eliot Feld and Les Grand Ballets Canadiens de Montreal. Put it......

When you're a teenager, there are several big moments in life--when you turn 16 and you can legally drive, 18 when you can vote, buy cigarettes and get pierced without parental consent and then the next big moment is 21. Hold On!! Highways Performance Space and Gallery, one of our local internationally renowned centers for new performance (dance, music, performance art and any hybrid thereof) is turning nineteen this weekend!! And, in this day and......

After all was said and done, yesterday morning's fire in Hollywood severely damaged Basque nightclub and the Blood Shot tattoo parlor. Two other adjacent occupancies of the building sustained moderate damage -- Sandee's shoe repair and the San Miguel Spa and Salon. Of the 180 firefighters who reported to the 5:31 a.m. fire, there were no injuries. For those who think an arsonist is involved in the recent spate of fires, Battalion Chief John Miller,......

Photo of Holly Johnston by Andre Andreev The Los Angeles concert dance community's Lester Horton Dance Awards, our hometown answer to the Oscars, New York's Tonys and Bessies, and San Francisco's Isadora Duncan awards were announced on Sunday at a humble event at the Jensen Recreation Center in Echo Park. Attended by a few hundred dancers, choreographers, collaborating artists and other supporters, this 17th annual occasion drew cheers and smiles from most of the......

Photo by Jean-Pierre Stoop, courtesy of UCLA Live Having broken into the international dance scene in 1987, Belgian choreographer/director/filmmaker Wim Vandekeybus is bringing a quasi-retrospective of his work to UCLA Live and Royce Hall for two performances of Spiegel on Friday and Saturday, May 2-3. Translating the title as "Mirror," the ninety minute intermissionless work includes excerpts from his groundbreaking What The Body Does Not Remember (1987) and six of his twenty subsequent creations.......

The fire at Hollywood and Vine spit flames 40 feet into the air. (AP Photo/Nick Ut) After just under two and one half hours, the fire at Basque nightclub was knocked down by the Los Angeles Fire Department, save for one flare up on a rooftop hotspot fifteen minutes later. At 5:31 a.m. this morning, a 9-1-1 phone call alerted officials to a fire at the building located on the northwest corner of Hollywood......

Update: The fire has been knocked down. Read the update here.A major alarm fire broke out at 5:31 a.m. this morning at the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine in the Basque nightclub space (map below). When firefighters responded, the building was fully engulfed in flames. It is suspected that it started in the attic. At 6:00 a.m., fire fighters went into defensive mode on the exterior of the building. By 7:15 a.m., 115 firefighters......

Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann, courtesy of the company In 1989, then modern dance bad boy Mark Morris took a seventeenth century opera and turned it into a cause celebre in staging the work for his dance company, then in residence at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. Almost twenty years later, and in a precedent-setting collaboration between the now-world renowned Mark Morris Dance Group. the Irvine Barclay Theatre, the Pacific Symphony......

Twenty years ago, former champion equestrian Judith Smith became involved with a movement class for wheelchair-bound women. She, herself, had injured her spinal cord in a car accident and could no longer ride. The class created its first choreography, which piqued people's interest and received a hugely popular positive response. So began AXIS Dance Company. Including both able-bodied and physically-challenged performers, the company has since performed throughout the United States, Europe, Russia, China and into......

Photo of Kristen Smiarowski by Derrick Bruce, courtesy of the artist With a press release that begins with "a South Korean, an Indonesian and two Jews walk into Highways Performance Space ," locally-based Kiha Lee, Sri Susilowati, Keith Glassman and Kristen Smiarowksi take over the intimate Santa Monica theater to premiere new dances April 10-12 at 8:30 pm. Known around town, nationally and internationally for making work that transcends the limitations of "eye candy,"......

Returning to Westwood after a five year absense, Montreal postmodern dance company La La La Human Steps brings its newest explosion of clasical technique, high speed dancing and punk attitude to Royce Hall this weekend through UCLA Live. Choreographed by Artistic Director Edouard Lock, "Amjad" re-fashions the romantic ballets that inspired it through the voracious dancing of nine extraordinary movers, film and original music composed and played live on stage by Bang on a Can's......

A reader sent along a pithy and poignant e-mail with a petition attached last week. The petition is to save one of the many LA Times cuts buyouts, specifically dance critic Lewis Segal, whose last piece was printed today. All the reader wrote was "Why is the LA times abandoning arts?" USC's Sasha Anawalt broke the news earlier this month on the National Arts Journalism Program's blog. She quotes Segal saying there is a chance......

Photo by Bonnie BonBon via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr PHOTOGRAPHY/OPENING RECEPTION A Narrative History of the Lightbulb is Catherine Wagner's show, inspired by the Baltimore Museum of Industry's collection of lightbulbs. Wagner chronicle's the evolution of the household object through color Lambda prints. An opening reception is scheduled for tonight. 6-8 p.m. // Gallery Luisotti (Bergamot Station Art Center) // 2525 Michigan Ave, Bldg A2 // Free DANCE In Glendale at......

Photo by ~db~ via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr It's official: Police have identified the Green Skeleton Bandit who was fatally shot earlier this week when he was caught in the act of robbing the AutoZone in NoHo by a US Marshal. He was 24-year-old Lawrence Dean Smith Jr. of Palmdale who used a knife and wore a skeleton-themed sweatsuit in his robberies. Fight for the right to ficus! Local activists in......

Director/choreographer/performer Liz Hoefner seems to bring her life to the stage. While this isn't a new or different way of making theater, Ms. Hoefner's life is filled with humorous moments that surround the challenges of being alive in our 21st century. Performed this past weekend at the Diavolo Dance Space downtown, her new work, Fear of Drowning/Fear of Flying, included a large cast of dancers, actors and musicians. These people loaded the stage with big......

Don't try this at home -- or at the Civic Center Metro Station. / Photo by puck90 via LAist's flickr pool. TRANSIT TALK Metro is studying alternatives for connecting the Gold, Blue and Expo lines through downtown Los Angeles. This study will examine linking the future Metro Gold Line Eastside Extension (near the Little Tokyo/Arts District Station) and the 7th Street/Metro Center Station. Tonight Metro will update the public on the project and allow......

See the video of this above picture below | Photo courtesy of the company En route to performances in New York, the highly acclaimed Irish company CoisCeim Dance Theatre, will make a stop at the Irvine BarclayTheater this Tuesday, February 26 -- its premiere West Coast engagement. Pronounced "kush came," the company will present their award winning evening length work, Knots, based on psychologist R.D. Laing 's book by the same title. Both the......

DANCE The State Ballet of Georgia arrives for their Los Angeles premiere at UCLA's Royce Hall to perform Giselle. This historic Russian dance company is taking on a classic, with Nina Ananiashvili in the spotlight as the company's artistic director and prima ballerina in the title role. 8 p.m. // Royce Hall, UCLA // Westwood Plz at Charles E Young Dr S// (310) 825-2101 // $20 - 90 SPOKEN WORD It's an Anything Goes Open......

COMEDY “Groundlings Swimsuit Edition” is the comedy troupe’s latest offering, with plenty of sketch and improv. Keep your fingers crossed that we won’t see them in Speedos. (But then again, Speedos are funny…) 8 pm // Groundling Theatre // 7307 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles // $21.50. FILM Crenshaw Boulevard comes to life in the hands of director Dan Wozniak and producer Christopher Molony. The documentary features 12 vignettes of people along the street’s 24......

photo courtesy of artist Local independent dance artist Liz Hoefner has directed and choreographed Fear of Drowning/Fear of Flying and will present its premiere this Friday through Sunday at the Diavolo Dance Space in the Brewery Arts Complex. According to her, the new dance theater work is a collection of stories, dialogues and dances that relate to actual and metaphorical fears of traveling, flying, drowning and dying in a post 9/11, tsunami, and Hurricane......

As the culminating event of a fifteen week workshop that joined veterans, performing artists, and activists in a series of verbal and physical conversations about their lives and aspirations, "Action Conversations" was presented at Highways Performance Space for only three performances, February 8-9. Through a collaborative process under the direction of UCLA professor and choreographer Victoria Marks, the performers revealed some of the highlights of their explorations of identity, heroics, mortality and civic responsibility in......

photo courtesy of the artist This Thursday through Saturday, award winning Argentine choreographer Diana Szeinblum is bringing four performers to REDCAT to present "Alaska" in its theater below Disney Hall. In her promotional material, Buenos Aires-based Szeinblum calls the work a "container of memories where everything that has not been said regarding a personal experience is kept." With original music by Ulises Conti for piano and viola and a physical language Szeinblum calls "extreme,"......

Grupo Fantasma plays Valentine's Day, 2/14 @ the Echoplex Make sure you get there by 9:00pm because the best band is on first Listen to 'Mentiras': Grupo Fantasma is coming to LA so get hydrated and they're playing a Valentine's Dance at the Echoplex.They're starting the night off so be sure to get there early (9:00pm) in order to catch their full set. Grupo Fantasma is an incredible latin funk orchestra (check out the LAist......

Sometimes one is in the mood for a gathering of people with great music, but instead of being happy and energetically dancing around, there is Give Up's "A Sad, Slow Dance Party" presented by dublab and Part Time Punks tonight at La Cita. Taking cue from the successfully subdued Give Up shows where DJs played gloomy music and devotees painted tears on their faces, this next installation takes on the lonely theme in time for......

THEATRE Orson's Shadow is an expansion of Austin Pendleton's drama that first ran a few years back at the Black Dahlia Theater and is now at the Pasadena Playhouse. It's a behind the scenes look at life in the theatre and the intermingling lives of some legendary folk, like Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Vivien Leigh, and drama critic Kenneth Tynan. We're told the set--a theater-within-the-theater--is stunning. 7:00 p.m. // Pasadena Playhouse // 39......

Unless you've been in a coma for the past few weeks, the Super Bowl is on Fox tomorrow afternoon around 3ish. But we heard an annoying tidbit the other day and just needed to ask, "Why?" As in "Why is Ryan Seacrest drawn to red carpets like my dog is to the patch of grass at the end of my street?" Yup, the KIIS-FM DJ and American Idol host will be doing the pre-game......

Photo provided by the company Anticipation was high as people entered Royce Hall on Friday to watch Vietnamese-born/French-raised choreographer Ea Sola bring her company of eight dancers and five musicians to the stage in their Los Angeles debut. They presented “Drought and Rain Vol. 2” and I don’t think this turned out to be what people expected. It wasn’t a European, Asian or American company filled with athletic virtuosi, dramatic visuals and a densely......

Torchwood is a guilty pleasure and its new season starts tonight on the BBCA. If you've ever been in a foreign land and seen a slightly dated American TV program come on and felt that queasy embarrassment then you know what watching Torchwood is like. It's cheesy and over-the-top science fiction with British accents and the odd dashing American thrown in. Everyone is hyper-sexed and they don't seem to discriminate between whichever sex they are......

Will it be pouring buckets tonight? If you aren't already planning on holing up with some popcorn and Netflix picks, you may want to get out and get your art & culture on. Let us help! ART ART LA 2008 is billed as "the only art fair in Los Angeles exclusively dedicated to contemporary art" and runs through tomorrow at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. This year's event "features 64 prominent international and Los Angeles-based......

This looks good -- an artist not yet heard in our neighborhood and a timeless theme. Plus references to things we may know something about. In its welcome mission of bringing outstanding international artists to our local performance scene, UCLA Live is hosting the Los Angeles debut of award-winning Company Ea Sola at Royce Hall for two shows this weekend. Raised in Vietnam during the war and trained in Paris, the female choreographer-performer Ea......