When Dance Loses Its Balance

Call it heresy, but Don Hewitt’s decision to stop running Dance Kaleidoscope may just be the best thing he’s done for the annual showcase series since he took it over in 1987.

Yes, Hewitt revived, upgraded and found a new base of operations for Dance K, moving it from the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in Hollywood to the State Playhouse and, later, the brand-new Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State L.A.

Yes, he deserved every one of his nine Lester Horton Dance Awards, plus the recent one for lifetime achievement, for the dedication and hard work that celebrated the diversity of the Southern California dance community through 75 Kaleidoscope performances by 200 artists in eight local venues during his tenure as artistic director.

But some of the same people who grew misty-eyed at the July 21 farewell tribute to Hewitt at the Japan America Theatre--the only Kaleidoscope event of 2001--often rolled those same eyes during intermissions of Kaleidoscope performances in recent seasons. Put together by the numbers and distinctive primarily because of guest artists or borrowed formats, such as the “From the Horse’s Mouth” talk fests, those seasons highlighted Hewitt’s deficiencies in program-building as much as the individual artists and companies on view. Moreover, as other local series began doing Kaleidoscope’s job better than Kaleidoscope itself, it was clearly time for new blood and new vision to take over.

As Hewitt departs for Oregon, although not before producing the second annual BalletFest Friday through next Sunday at the Luckman--Kaleidoscope stands at a crossroads, with no successor to Hewitt yet chosen, no future policy yet announced, no limitations yet imposed. If the isolated and often passive Southland dance community has any insight or guidance to contribute, now’s the time. Everyone in this community is primed for high achievement, and the possibilities are, well, kaleidoscopic.

Up to now, Dance K has depended on the energies of two tireless, volunteer (i.e., unpaid ) directors: Hewitt, of course, but before him, Betty Empey, formerly executive director of John Clifford’s Los Angeles Ballet. Empey founded the series in the late 1970s, producing it annually at the Ford through the Los Angeles Area Dance Alliance, a service organization in the community.

The state of Southland dance at that time, and the priorities of the alliance, focused Empey’s Kaleidoscope on access and institutional growth: giving local and often studio-bound companies a chance to present themselves on a large stage under professional concert-dance conditions. Empey succeeded, but when she left for the Bay Area in 1984, the series lapsed.

Enter Hewitt, a ballet-trained educator and former dancer who inherited the need for access and growth but produced the series without the involvement of the alliance or its successor, the Dance Resource Center. This independence freed him to demand greater quality control--in theory, at least--and his commitment to holding annual auditions guaranteed that emerging or unknown artists would have the same chance for inclusion as anyone else.

Although Hewitt’s love of ballet never prevented Kaleidoscope from showcasing the widest possible range of artists and idioms, his principles as an educator arguably proved more troublesome. Put simply, the same belief in a dancer or choreographer’s future promise that made him, by all accounts, an inspiring teacher also made his Dance Kaleidoscope a monument to half-realized ambitions, unfulfilled potential and endless second chances for dancers or companies unable to rise to the challenge.

His approach may sound generous, even noble--until you sit through a few programs dragged down by it. But it became increasingly irrelevant as the Dance Roots series and those run by dancers Samuel Donlavy and, more recently, Deborah Brockus took on Dance K’s original mission of providing increased access to the concert dance audience and related opportunities for growth.

Parallel to these bottom-line series came those with exactly the purposeful curatorial focus that Kaleidoscope always lacked: the city of Los Angeles’ COLA showcases at the L.A. Theatre Center, even the DanceWest choreography competition hosted by Kaleidoscope at the Luckman. The most visionary, perhaps, may have been Judy Mitoma’s Asia Pacific Performance Exchange at UCLA. That series championed a concept of community much greater and more inclusive than any we’d dared consider: the whole Pacific Rim as our cultural home.

These and other series proved that, when it comes to dance, there are many ways to slice the Big Orange.

However, Kaleidoscope’s response was merely to paste a few catchy, quasi-curatorial slogans on individual events. But, discounting a few, inconclusive experiments, the series stayed committed to variety-show programming: not exactly a popular format in America right now and one that often left the most complex works on view at a major disadvantage.

Obviously, high-concept choreography and flashy technique make their effect under any circumstances. But choreographers exploring new or unfamiliar movement languages need time just to teach the audience how to watch their pieces--and a this-’n’-that programming format can misdirect the audience’s expectations. Even if you insist that the word “kaleidoscope” mandates maximum diversity, what’s wrong with spreading that diversity across an entire Kaleidoscope summer rather than beating it to death every single night?

Ultimately, through no fault of its own, Dance Kaleidoscope has been saddled with a problem that no director can solve: In words from the Hewitt tribute on July 21, it represents the mirror in which the local dance community sees itself.

Other dance communities are able to see themselves through work presented in a year-round performance space--the sort of space that artist and activist Tim Miller co-founded in Santa Monica under the name Highways and turned into an internationally recognized center for performance art. Other dance communities are also able to see themselves through the mutually productive relationships they’ve formed with their local public television stations.

Not here. No, like the Flying Dutchman, this dance community is condemned to work all over the map and frequently without much attention from its rank and file members. And this dance community can’t seem to get arrested on movie-obsessed KCET. So, year by year, Dance Kaleidoscope has come to loom unnaturally large on the landscape, a surrogate for the facilities and performing options that would offer true access and growth.

So even if Dance K were much, much better, it could never be enough--and treating Hewitt as the father of us all is simply an evasion of responsibility. Community validation should be the community’s job, and if Dance Kaleidoscope really is a mirror, it may resemble the looking glass in the story of Snow White: transmitting comforting illusions but, in the end, reflecting only desperation.

A few modest proposals for the future--assuming that Dance K doesn’t lapse again, as it did when Empey left:

(1) Make the post of Kaleidoscope artistic director a fully paid , full-time position. Yes, this proposal may mean that some grant money that would have gone to local artists might now go to the Dance K director, but if the series is as valuable as we kept hearing during the tribute to Hewitt, it deserves professional leadership and compensation to match.

(2) Declare a commitment to excellence and stick by it. If only six, nine, 12 really fine artists or companies audition in a given summer, make them and only them Kaleidoscope that year. Treat each program as a personal mandate: “I, [director and board members, sign your names here] sincerely believe that this dancer or company must be seen this summer to fully appreciate the achievements of Southern California dance.” Sounds draconian, but the understandably wary Dance K audience will need convincing.

(3) Insist that anything considered for presentation must either be the creation of the artists or companies auditioning it or, in the case of adaptations and borrowed repertory, legally authorized by the owners--and that includes the accompanying music. No exceptions. In the past, Kaleidoscope has been tainted by choreographic plagiarism, so the need for such a policy is far from speculative.

(4) Dancers, choreographers, company leaders, Dance Resource Center honchos: Don’t over-invest in Dance Kaleidoscope. No series can be all things to all people--and this one may well have shafted itself trying.

In a healthier, more supportive Southland dance community, Dance Kaleidoscope would be just one more summer series--not the center of the local dance universe--and even this column of commentary would represent a needless overreaction.