Benn Widdey

photo of Sam Kim by Ryan McNamara, courtesy of Show Box New York modern dance artists performing in Los Angeles are always exciting contributors to the local scene. They bring energy and an up-to-the-moment snapshot of diverse and, hopefully, compelling ideas. This past month has seen a small handful of gems with Tere O'Connor's Rammed Earth at the Skirball, recent resident Stephan Koplowitz's Liquid Landscapes at California Plaza and other sites throughout the city/county...

Earlier this year, choreographer Meg Wolfe received a Lester Horton award for her tireless work for the Los Angeles dance community. These Horton awards are akin to the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) citations, in that the artists, themselves, make the selections and vote for the awardees. Ms. Wolfe took it all in stride, smiling while keeping track of the monthly Anatomy Riot showcases that she curates, the weekly DanceBank class program she organizes and a...

photo by Paula Court, courtesy of the artist Jordan Peimer, program director at the Skirball Cultural Center, does a great job of bringing interesting non-mainstream dance talent to our city. In the recent past he brought Neil Greenberg, Liz Lerman, the Sitelines series and international companies and artists that don't fill the seats in the large venues, but who, nonetheless, expand the art form beyond its traditions and conventions. Always interesting, if not mind-blowing....

Highlighting the combination of dance and film/video, the 7th annual Dance Camera West festival begins its month long series of screenings, ceremonies and related events this Friday at the REDCAT Theater downtown. Presenting a wide variety of short, feature length and documentary work, the events will occur at locations that range from the American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica to the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood to films shown with...

Photo by Paul Antico, courtesy of the artist You know you've experienced it, talked about it or even watched it somewhere along the line, but Christine Suarez DanceTheater is taking female orgasm and, together with an intergenerational group of women, she's presenting dance theater about it in the ecologically-sound Eco Cottages this Friday and Saturday nights on the Venice Beach....

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...

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...

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....

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...