These Venues and Programmers Have Turned L.A. Into a World-Class Performing Arts Town
Los Angeles Magazine features CAP UCLA Executive and Artistic Director, Kristy Edmunds
Kristy Edmunds, the executive and artistic director of UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance, is featured in Los Angeles Magazine as one of the city's influential arts programmers who is redefining the performing arts landscape of Los Angeles.
"How can you tell if the audience is enjoying the show? If you are Thor Steingraber, the director of the Soraya performing arts center, you do it by sitting in just about every seat in the house—picking up the acoustic experience and sight lines, listening for the sighs or laughs or dead spots from the crowd—and going to all the shows you put on in your hall at Cal State Northridge. During a four-night stand by a theater group, he’s there for each one. “I like to see my audience’s experiences from 8:01 until everyone leaves,” Steingraber says of looking for what he calls “the feel in the room. That’s the reward; that’s the payoff.”
Los Angeles has become well-known over the decades for superstar visual artists like Ed Ruscha and Laura Owens and for starchitects like Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne. Steingraber represents a way Los Angeles has been asserting itself more recently: as a formidable town for the performing arts.
While they’re not the only stages in town, the Soraya (formerly the Valley Performing Arts Center), the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, and the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills—all, at a decade old or less, relative toddlers—add significantly to what’s put on by the old lions here, UCLA and the Music Center. Sometimes the fare is familiar work by an established act; other times it’s startling—a theater work that combines opera singing with a mariachi orchestra, an improvised piece based on the wit of Dorothy Parker, an operatic reimagining of the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast, or a marathon 24-hour history of popular music, in drag, that makes Ziggy Stardust look understated. These venues also offer room for the local indie groups that have broken in recent years—the Calder Quartet, for example—creating art rooted in L.A."— Scott Timberg, June 13, 2018
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Los Angeles Magazine website.
Stay engaged. Use #UCLAarts to stay connected.
