Refashioning a Dance Scene

The recent announcement that the Dance Kaleidoscope showcase series had folded after 13 years because of the board’s inability to recruit a new artistic director created a negligible stir. It may have been regrettable, but it essentially changed nothing.

As late as summer 2000, Dance K presented 30 local artists or companies over three weekends. But last year, the series offered only a token, one-performance farewell to its departing leader, Don Hewitt. By that time the dance community had already begun changing to prepare for the post-Kaleidoscope era.

Today, the landscape is noticeably different than in Dance K’s heyday. If the series represented, in the words of a board member, “the mirror in which the local dance community sees itself,” that mirror shattered with the last full-scale Kaleidoscope season. Now, pieces of its mission have been picked up by new leaders. Moreover, several institutions and performance series have redefined their identities to accommodate the needs of a wider range of Southland dance artists.

In this changing dance environment, there is a welcome assertion of artists’ visions and, in some cases, higher standards.

Dance K and its classical spinoff, BalletFest, were shaped by Hewitt’s priorities. He was a distinguished teacher who proved, year after year, in my view, to be less committed to quality control than to giving emerging talents their big break. As a result, the series often sank to a sub-professional workshop level.

The recent 2002 BalletFest, under new direction, showed what we’d been missing: curatorship focused on excellence in the here and now. No company danced poorly, and the aim seemed to be not merely celebrating the existence of ballet in California, but making it matter.

In terms of prestige, the annual C.O.L.A. Awards (from the city of Los Angeles) arguably developed into the premier local dance event during Dance K’s twilight, offering Southland choreographers not merely increased exposure, but also genuine financial support in the form of grants to create work. There may be only four chosen dance or performance artists per year on the honors list, but the visibility of new repertory at the Los Angeles Theatre Center downtown over two weekends has become a major community event.

Also sponsoring new work is the county’s curated summer performance series at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre. In the past, companies might have moved from a multi-company Kaleidoscope night at the Ford to a full evening of their own there. Now, the Ford series has been expanded, giving an impetus to ensembles to seek the brass ring: the dance mainstream.

Still, without Dance K, a big gap exists between such alternative performance spaces as Highways Performance Space (no less important than before as a haven for experimental work) and bigger stages such as the Ford and Grand Performances’ Watercourt. Helping companies bridge that gap, Howard Ibach’s L.A. Dance Invitational, an annual charity benefit, most recently at the Doolittle, has morphed from a commercial dance event to a ritzy display of local diversity. Rock and show biz routines still set the pace, but plenty of other kinds of work amplified and deepened it this year.

New multi-company theme events, often artist-organized, are growing more important. One this year spotlighted African American achievement through the disorganized but promising Black Choreographers Festival at the L.A. Theatre Center; another considered feminist innovation in the ambitious Dance Moving Forward festival at Highways. One more, just announced, will open the Skirball Cultural Center to site-specific dance starting in November.

At best, such series reflect the artists’ passionate sense of mission, rather than a something-for-everyone approach a la Dance K. And within the limits of the themes, it has been good to see that a sense of generosity and responsibility to fellow artists informed such events.

Self-presentation has also blossomed in the wake of Dance K, sometimes in those theme events. The city has provided opportunities for self-presentation at the L.A. Theatre Center, and the youthful, fearless Dance L.A. troupe, led by Brian Pelletier, took the bait several times in the past year--most notably in its multi-company “Instinct” program, a kind of do-it-yourself approximation of a Dance K mixed bill. The results were spotty, but the initiative was impressive.

Self-presentation is also finding a home at the El Portal space in North Hollywood. Relatively low cost is a major factor, but it also matters that an upgrade of its more problematic facilities (sound insulation, for starters) is reportedly in the offing. And its location, perceived as safer than LA Theater Center, helps.

The biggest change in the landscape involves the ascendance of Deborah Brockus’ Spectrum series to the role of Dance Kaleidoscope’s natural successor. The word “spectrum,” of course, expresses the same sense of variety as “kaleidoscope”--although it conveys, appropriately enough in this case, a more purposeful sense of organization. In the multiple duties of dancer, choreographer, company leader, series producer and sometimes even the technician responsible for running video projectors backstage, Brockus has had to be organized or die.

This weekend’s Spectrum is the 12th in the series, now running four times a year at the tiny Ivar Theatre in Hollywood. It showcases 17 local dancers and companies. In addition, Brockus started what she hopes will be two additional series: a children’s showcase (“New Perspectives”) and a multimedia event (“Caught Between: Dancing for Camera and Live Audience”).

Multiply the number of performances in her three series by the average number of performing groups on view, and she’s clearly the front-runner in local dance presentation, already out-achieving Dance Kaleidoscope in scope of activity, although not yet in attendance.

Some members of the local dance community view Brockus with suspicion because she presents her own work on each of her programs (except for the children’s series), and because she specializes in pop or jazz dance, a form always plentiful in the Southland but not always respected by those coming from the ballet or modern dance worlds.

Those who share this suspicion used to put down Spectrum as a showcase of nonentities, but after Jamie Nichols took home multiple Lester Horton Dance Awards this year for work presented in the series, that attitude slipped quietly into obsolescence.

Certainly Spectrum differs from Dance K in the inclusion of much more pop choreography and, thus far at least, far less world dance. (Brockus has said she wants more, and the lineup for Spectrum 12 offers some evidence of progress.) Moreover the emphasis on short pieces means the audience sees twice as many companies a night as Dance K programmed.

The choices reflect Brockus’ curatorial philosophy and she’s entitled. The reality of Southland dance in 2002 is that some of the hottest choreographers work everywhere--pop modernist Robert Gilliam, for instance, has presented work for Brockus, Ibach, the Ford series and even the monthly, late-night, all-pop Choreographers Carnival at the Key Club on the Sunset Strip. Stephanie Gilliland’s hybrid Tongue dancers turn up nearly as often. In a freewheeling, nonsectarian society, can dance afford to enforce boundaries?

Obviously, the integration of concert dance and popular culture is a fertile subject for another essay, but Brockus’ Spectrum often makes the juncture seem imminent as well as exciting. In the meantime, any local choreographers or company leaders who don’t have her on their Christmas card lists just aren’t paying attention.

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Lewis Segal is The Times’ dance critic.