Benn Widdey

The LA Improv Dance Festival exploded onto the downtown scene last week with classes and jams from Tuesday on though the weekend. Friday, Saturday and Sunday, audiences were treated to some amazing performances by the workshop faculty and local dancers/improvisers. I was lucky enough to get there on Friday night for the In-Site Collaboration Performance. When performers find their groove in these improvisations, it's hard to tell that they are improvising. It looks like they've...

Jazz performers improvise in front of an audience all of the time. At each sitting, different combinations of instruments and players create unique variations of existing sounds and tunes or develop something brand new to our ears. It's thrilling to listen to the artists search for their individuality within the known arrangement of tones, scales, rhythms and meters. Or, it can fall flat. Still, when you bring the best together, even flat can be amazing...

Stage and screen choreographer Michael Kidd died this past Sunday in Los Angeles at the age of 92, according to the New York Times. From his beginnings in Brooklyn, Kidd moved over to Manhattan to dance and create dances for dance companies including Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan (1937), Eugene Loring's Dance Players (1941) and Ballet Theater, the predecessor to the American Ballet Theater (1942-47). Soon after dance critic Edwin Denby opined that Kidd's talents "leaned...

When I waited tables in New York City, we had a very popular item we sold called a quattroformaggio pizelle--a thin crusted pizza made from a flour tortilla with mozzarella, asiago, parmesan and fontina cheeses. It was light, it was tasty, but Barbara Walters once asked me if it was low fat and I could only smile and bring her a salad. That's my history with the four cheese idea. Last weekend (December 14-15, 2007),...