92 Year in Review : The Cover Thing : Rising Above the Ruin

It was a disastrous year for dance in Southern California--and not only because of all the untimely deaths listed elsewhere in this issue.

Both the collapse of the San Diego Foundation for the Performing Arts and the abandonment of plans to build the Dance Gallery on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles left touring companies with fewer incentives to visit the West Coast, just as the recession made the prospect of unsubsidized self-presentation a losing proposition. (Last week, San Francisco Ballet canceled its June engagement at the Music Center for this reason.)

The opening of the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts next month may help remedy the situation, but the unprecedented $90 top ticket price for Twyla Tharp’s February performances there with Mikhail Baryshnikov has already prompted questions from members of the Southland dance community about Cerritos’ sense of responsibility.

Of course, the whole city suffered from the spring riots, but so did some dancing visitors. For example, Miami City Ballet went home from a canceled UCLA engagement with major losses that contributed to a reported $250,000 shortfall for the year.

Following the riots, the Joffrey Ballet walked away from a planned monthlong season at the Wiltern Theatre, inviting not only new financial crises but ongoing litigation with the Wiltern that places its future in Los Angeles at risk. Even the Kirov Ballet claimed that the riots caused a 50% drop in anticipated ticket sales at Shrine Auditorium.

The year’s most notable dance events included the second Bournonville Festival by the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen in April and the sixth Festival of Pacific Arts in the Cook Islands in October.

Happily, the Southland shared in both--through a brief visit by the Danes to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in June, and through an ambitious 20-year project by the UCLA World Arts and Cultures department to document each Pacific Arts festival on videotape.

Here is a grab bag of memorable 1992 performances from one aficionado’s datebook:

Modern Dance

Qing Fang’s “In Dark Places” at Schoenberg Hall, UCLA, started the year on a high level of imagination and commitment with its depiction of an artist’s instinctual resistance to corrupt and brutal authority.

Images of the individual engulfed by the mob made Martha Graham’s 1936 “Steps in the Street” a timely revival even before the riots and positively prophetic afterward. (The company bypassed L.A. but appeared at the Civic Theatre, San Diego, in March.)

Julie Laffin’s solo “Redress” at the National Woman’s Theatre Festival at UCLA in August boldly tracked the process of changing a vital young woman into a tawdry sex-cliche.

The April “Black Choreographers” festival in San Diego and/or Westwood provided another look at work by the mesmerizing David Rousseve and the very wicked, very exciting Donald Byrd. However, pride of place belonged to Maia Claire Garrison for stripping African tribal dances of their anthropological content and manipulating their rich movement resources with disarming bravado.

The year found Paul Taylor winning an Emmy and one of the Kennedy Center Honors. Ironically, his company’s retrospective programs at both UCLA and OCPAC in November emphasized the creative defiance in his vision and technique: his anti-ballet, anti-Establishment innovations that so many others have copied. Never has a dance artist worked so feverishly at remaining an outsider--and failed so gloriously.

Ballet

Alonzo King’s Lines Contemporary Ballet (at UC San Diego and elsewhere in November) provided one of the year’s few glimpses of classicism in the present tense--all the resources and heritage of ballet focused on the here and now.

Otherwise, the most up-to-date choreographic vision came from the Joffrey Ballet revival of Leonide Massine’s 1933 “Les Presages” at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, in July. Nothing less than a stylized dance-portrait of a society succumbing to the dangerous new energies of Nazism, “Presages” joined the Joffrey repertory exactly when neo-Nazism flared up dangerously in a newly united Germany.

Along with the Royal Danes, the Houston Ballet “Sleeping Beauty” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in June showed how 19th-Century classics can still be living theatrical experiences--unlike the deadly charades executed so grimly by the Kirov Ballet in its two visits.

However, the Kirov at least offered a gallery of cherishable interpretations: the touchingly childlike Zhanna Ayupova, for instance, in the Kirov Ballet “Romeo and Juliet” at OCPAC in May and the warm, eloquent Larissa Lezhnina in “The Nutcracker” at both OCPAC and the Pavilion in December.

The year also boasted Amanda McKerrow’s sensational transformations of style and attack in the American Ballet Theatre “Don Quixote” at OCPAC in February and Nikolaj Hubbe’s blend of impulsive passion and drop-dead technique in both the Royal Danish “Napoli” and “La Sylphide.” In addition, Anthony Randazzo of San Francisco Ballet breezed through bravura steps that used to belong only to Baryshnikov during the abridged “Who Cares?” at Hollywood Bowl in July.

World Dance

American Indian Dance Theatre paid tribute to tribal elders in a soulful performance at the Claremont Colleges and UCLA in February. The next month, 85-year-old Japanese “National Living Treasure” Fujima Fujiko brought a lifetime of wisdom to her family’s program of Kabuki dance at the Japan America Theatre.

Enlightened family values also linked Hideko and Setsuko Tamagusuku of the Okinawan Traditional Dance and Music Company at the JAT in April, as well as the Nomura Kyogen group at the same venue in September. Like Fujima Fujiko’s dancing, Mansaku Nomura’s performance of the ritual “Sambaso” aimed at nothing short of the sublime and knew exactly how to get there.

Celebrating 40 years of splendor, Ballet Folklorico de Mexico made it seem a golden anniversary by emphasizing the oranges, yellows and earth-tones in both costumes and lighting at OCPAC, Shrine Auditorium and elsewhere in November.

Close to Home

Nobody matched the high-risk physicality of Mehmet Sander’s postmodernism at Highways in February, at “Dance Kaleidoscope” in July and, most of all, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center this month. However, Jacques Heim’s Diavolo Dance Theatre unleashed plenty of muscle-power along with wit and sensuality in a fresh, inventive survey of contemporary dementia at Barnsdall Park in November.

The Bella Lewitzky retrospective reached its zenith at Occidental College in January just hours after her resignation from the Dance Gallery.

The year’s bleakest choreographic visions belonged, of course, to John Malashock in a gorgeously danced program at Cal State Long Beach in March. The happiest collaboration may have been Derick Grant and Sam Weber’s superb fire-and-ice “Duo” for the Jazz Tap Ensemble at Barnsdall Park in May. The snazziest comeback: A return by the Aman Folk Ensemble from two years of virtual local invisibility--at Cal Tech in October.