Bay Area Troupe Finds New Life in L.A. Roost

Nesting Dolls is L.A.’s new dance company on the block, and this week it makes its second full evening appearance in town, at the Getty Center. But it’s also a troupe with 10 years of experience. That’s because Nesting Dolls and its director, dancer-choreographer Cid Pearlman, are, like so many Angelenos, transplants.

In this case, Pearlman moved her artistic efforts south from San Francisco to get away from high rents and the sense that she and her company had done everything they could in Northern California.

Pearlman, 38, who sports a shock of gold bangs that violently clashes with the rest of her black, pageboy-length hair, founded Nesting Dolls in 1991. Working out of such prestigious Bay Area spaces as Theater Artaud and ODC (Oberlin Dance Company) Theater (where the company had a three-year residency), she built a seven-dancer ensemble known for its socially conscious choreography and expansive physicality. Nesting Dolls performed in the Bay Area about 20 times a year, as well as touring places such as Portland, Ore., and New York, the latter with her partner and Nesting Dolls associate director David King.

But, Pearlman says, keeping the company afloat and paying the members of Nesting Dolls a living wage got harder and harder in San Francisco as the dot-com boom took hold. Among the casualties was Dancers’ Group Studio Theater, which lost its lease last August when its rent increased a whopping 400%, to $15,000 a month. According to Time magazine, six other dance studios in San Francisco’s Mission District were forced to call it quits by November of last year.

And, says Pearlman, the decision to move wasn’t only about economics--it was also the vibe. “It takes a lot to give up your connections and your roots,” she says, “[but] the demographics of the city changed. It wasn’t just the rent, it was much less artist-friendly.”

Though Pearlman and King, who still dances with Nesting Dolls, considered a number of cities they thought would be amenable to dance and to their budgets--including Austin, Texas; Minneapolis; and Boston--L.A. got the nod when King was accepted into a master’s program in dance at UCLA.

“I had lived here in the early ‘80s for a summer,” recalls Pearlman, “and I knew, contrary to the San Francisco-L.A. competition, that I liked it. My cousin, Ilya Pearlman, a director and performance artist, had moved here in 1998, and when David interviewed at UCLA, we came down and checked it out.”

Love of Dance Took Root Early

Pearlman was raised on Cape Cod by jewelry-making “bohemian” parents, in her words. It was her aunt, Bunny Pearlman, a dancer who studied with Erick Hawkins, who first taught her modern dance technique.

“I decided I wanted to be a choreographer when I was 12,” Pearlman says, during a rehearsal for the company’s Getty Center appearance. “I then studied dance at [New York City’s] Hunter College and at San Francisco State University.”

Pearlman, however, gave in to wanderlust before finishing a degree. In 1983, she took off for West Berlin, where she became a punk-underground art scenester while she kept up her dance training. To support herself, Pearlman choreographed “fashion things” and ran her own design business, specializing in rubber. (“Belts, not sex items,” she says.) But after three years, she returned to San Francisco and performing. She danced with various companies there, including Tracy Rhodes and Dance Brigade.

Recalling that “there was some chutzpah involved,” Pearlman established Nesting Dolls four years after her return to Northern California. Since then, she has created 22 works for the troupe, garnering favorable reviews along the way: The San Francisco Bay Guardian cited a “stirring fusion of aggressive attack and strong technical lyricism”; the Oakland Tribune described a Pearlman work as “filled with moments of shimmering intelligence.”

Still, Pearlman says, she was ready for the change of hometown. And although L.A. may not exactly be a dance mecca, she appears to be thriving here.

Explains Pearlman: “There’s no support for dance anywhere, and there’s no reason L.A. should be financially [harder] than anywhere else. While I liked the work I was doing in San Francisco, I was bored with my process. Coming to L.A. has helped me reinvestigate how and why I make dances. I love it here.”

The challenges of starting up the company here have not dampened Pearlman’s enthusiasm. Chief among them has been replacing the athletically oriented dancers of her San Francisco company--they didn’t follow her south because she couldn’t guarantee when and at what financial level she would get Nesting Dolls back into action. It took about a year.

“Finding dancers with the technical experience that I like has been difficult,” she admits. “I met Miriam Kramer at Highways [Performance Space in Santa Monica] and put her in a piece I choreographed [for my cousin] when I first got here. I auditioned others. Putting together the resources--finding a new technical director, lighting and costume designers--was really about building a new team, but L.A. has been generous to us.”

Pearlman, who has a day job at the Museum of Television and Radio, has already made her presence felt: She sits on the board of Dance Resource Center and was invited to teach at Highways. In addition, Nesting Dolls is doing a one-year residency at Loyola Marymount University. Pearlman has also organized the fledgling “max 10 Performance Laboratory” at Electric Lodge in Venice, where up to 10 dancers are able to try out up to 10 minutes’ worth of material on the first Monday of each month.

Special Program for Getty Appearance

For the Getty program, Pearlman is presenting “Church/Sea” and “Drive,” a collaboration with composer Jonathan Segel and Los Angeles-based filmmaker Ann Kaneko, that Pearlman made for Nesting Dolls’ L.A. debut at Highways last fall. Though its title may imply the L.A. car culture, the work, which has been reconfigured for the Getty’s larger stage, is also about exploring passion and shifting visions.

Pearlman, squatting on the floor of the rehearsal studio, intently studies her dancers as they run through their moves. “Your thighs don’t have enough bump,” she tells Elizabeth Hoefner, demonstrating a bump turn and whacking her own thighs. The pulsing of Segel’s score perfectly accompanies the backward flip that Armin Moradian executes, while King, Arianne MacBean and Kramer hop in unison, ending in a splayed-finger tableau reminiscent of Shiva.

Kramer, 24, is excited to be a part of Nesting Dolls. “Cid has a special way of choreographing that was new to me,” she said. “She also wants to encourage dancing in L.A. and sharing among artists.”

Pearlman, who prefers choreographing to performing these days, says that her goal for the company is to make the best contemporary dance she can.

“It’s not about being famous. But the more successful I can be, the more I can pay my dancers. While it [may sound like] a pipe dream, I am looking to create some institutional stability and be a part of helping the L.A. dance scene grow.”

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* Nesting Dolls at the Harold M. Williams Auditorium, Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Friday, 7:30 p.m. (310) 440-7300. Free.