You See LA: Winter 2016
Five things to see and do around LA this winter, handpicked by Victoria Marks
Victoria Marks, an Alpert Award winner, Guggenheim and Rauschenberg Fellow, and Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, has been practicing knowing and unknowing, and making dances for stage and film, for the past 36 years. Marks’ creative work migrates between “choreo-portraits” and “action conversations” for individuals who don’t identify as dancers, and dances for dancers that fuel her inquiries into movement. Since 1995, Marks has been a professor of choreography at UCLA, and since 2014, chair of the disability studies minor.
The Wooster Group: The Room by Harold Pinter
Ari Fliakos in The Room (photo: Paula Court) Image courtesey of REDCAT
Feb. 4–14
Feb. 4–6: 8:30 p.m., Feb. 7 & 14: 3 p.m.
REDCAT
General Admission: $55, Students and REDCAT Members: $40–$45, CalArts Students/Faculty/Staff: $25–$30
OK, I’d go see anything made by the Wooster Group. Their predilection for reenacting, colliding, and re-performing existing works becomes an homage to original source material, an inquiry into the production of art and a startling discovery about our own experience. I am forever unsettled by their work. I don’t know what is true, and I don’t trust anyone who thinks they know what is true. However I trust the Wooster Group to guide me to a place where experience, and not truth, matters.
CONTRA-TIEMPO: Agua Furiosa
Image courtesey of CAP UCLA
Jan 14–24
Jan. 14–16 & 21–23: 8 p.m., Jan. 17 & 24: 4 p.m.
Glorya Kaufman Hall, Theater (Room 200)
General Admission: $29, UCLA Students: $15, UCLA Faculty and Staff: $25
Salseras ususally meet in clubs and bars, but in this case, CONTRA-TIEMPO’s dancers claim the concert stage. These splendid young artists make themselves at home in theaters across the country—theaters that might otherwise be the preserve of white privileged contemporary ballet and post-modern dance. The dancers (indeed) have a fury about them: an abandon and a joy that is otherwise hard to capture. CONTRA-TIEMPO’s artistic director Ana Maria Alvarez (M.F.A., Dance, ’05) insists that dance can change people’s lives—in part because her dances grow like wildflowers from living rooms, street corners, and community centers, rather than conservatories. Agua Furiosa has been several years in the making, and it speaks to us about our relationship to water. Despite El Nino, a timely topic.
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan presents Rice choreographed by Lin Hwai-min
credit: LIU Chen-hsiang
Jan. 29–31
Jan 29 & 30: 7:30 p.m., Jan. 31: 2 p.m.
Dorothy Chandler Pavillion
Price: $34–$138
Lin Hwai-min’s Cloudgate Dance Theatre travels the world, but uniquely articulates Taiwanese history and culture. The dancers train in martial arts, Chinese Classical Dance, meditation, and western forms. Hence, they inhabit a quality of sustained time punctuated by a fleet footedness, a sense of speed that seems frictionless. Their liquid flow of energy is sourced at the center but moves toward the periphery, like a stream. The lines they create in the body spiral and twist, turn in and out, quite differently from the lines of a ballet informed aesthetic. My favorite projects of theirs are called Calligraphy and indeed the dancers move like ink across a page. Their current project, Rice, seems to describe lives lived close to the earth, and accord and discord between humans and nature. There seems to be wind and ripples and tides.
Katharine Hawthorne: The Cave
credit: www.khawthorne.net/
Friday, Feb. 12
8:30 p.m.
Highways Performance Space
General Admission: $20 general admission, Members/Students/Seniors: $15
Would you like to see a young and gifted choreographer’s work just as she is starting out? Do you want to go to a small theater and be witness to her process, to be a part of the encounter that shapes her future work? If so, I would like to introduce you to Katharine Hawthorne, a dancer/choreographer who, since graduating from Stanford, has been creating and performing her work in the Bay Area, as well as nationally and internationally. She has gotten some well-deserved attention and support from presenters and foundations and is someone to watch, for sure. She will be presenting her solo work, The Cave as part of New Shoes 7, an ongoing series of new and in-development dance and physical theater works by emerging and established artists at Highways Performance Space. If you’re a Highways virgin, go and check it out! Highways is a venerable garage/theater in Santa Monica that has been an essential home for artists and activists for more than a quarter of a century.
I know I’ve provided quite a fulsome report on events that I’m excited about this Winter, but I couldn’t NOT mention this one:
Catherine Opie: Portraits at The Hammer
Catherine Opie, Kate & Laura, . Pigment print. 77 x 58 in. (195.6 x 147.3 cm). Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Purchase. ©Catherine Opie, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong.
Jan. 30–May 22
Museum Hours:
Monday: Closed
Tuesday–Friday: 11 a.m.–8 p.m.
Saturday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.
Free
If a photograph is a moment caught in time; if photography offers a “here-ness” that is suspended between a past and future, then Catherine Opie catches not only the moment, but also the sense of subjects living through time. To me, her subjects reveal intelligence and complexity without effort. As a spectator, I can’t “own” the individuals in her images. Instead, I am left to wonder at the weight of their/our ephemerality, the wonder and gravitas of each individual’s life. If when we look at images—photographs or paintings, dances or theater—we have the opportunity to see through the author’s eyes, then I trust that Catherine Opie’s eyes see grace and exceptionality within the larger flow of human kindness.