William Keiser

Directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne in collaboration with the New Adventures artistic team, this  masterful re-telling of Romeo and Juliet, an ageless tale of teenage discovery and the madness of first love, premiered in 2019, and now makes its North American premiere with Terry Davies’ thrillingly fresh orchestrations of Prokofiev’s dynamic score at the Ahmanson…

MURDER MYSTERY THEATER, WITHOUT THE MURDER PART Performers romp through a mist-filled space, trying to be mountains in this continuous dance performance. At the start of L.A. Dance Project’s The Missing Mountain by L.A. Dance Project choreographic Artists-in-Residence Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, is the sound. As the audience enters the theater, we are…

WHEN DOES AN ARTIST PREVAIL? “Dance is a unifying and sacred act,” a blonde woman in velvet black evening gown and netted 1930s “fascinator” cap bellows to a room of dancegoers. “Congress,” she continues, every word laden with religious gravitas, “exists to protect and hold that act:” She crouches to her knees, contorting her body,…

GET UP AND DANCE! I was fifteen, watching the musical Hair, when I last remember getting up out of my seat and dancing with performers at a show. I’ve always found that moment (you know the one I’m referring to, dancers inching closer to you, extending their hands, inviting you to participate) a mortifying one;…

RESTRAINT Oh, restraint, that most pesky of virtues. We all begin our journeys with dance in the same way: with wild abandon, the freedom of children running in tutus or imitating bars of pop songs, or holding hands with our elders in a circle, stepping in a grapevine left or right. We know not restraint,…

CORTISOL ROCKSTARS I am an irreverent narrator when it comes to reviewing dance, because I delight in the mischief of disrespecting the convention of separating creation from creator. A work most interests me as either a universe in itself (for the transcendent), or, for everything else, as an expression of a human psyche – its…

BALLET IS WOMAN What is the true nature of beauty? Do objects we find beautiful contain beauty, or, as Plato theorized, do they merely reflect its true heavenly form? These are the questions posed by American Contemporary Ballet’s evening, Concerto Barocco: A Balanchine Ballet. And when I say these are the questions posed, I am…

THIN LOVE We go to the ballet for bodies. Don’t we? If the dance audience at The Wallis in Beverly Hills, where I saw Alonzo King LINES Ballet’s Deep River yesterday (there is one more performance tonight, June 10), were presented with a version of the AMC Theater’s Nicole Kidman promotional trailer, what would she…