Picasso had his blue period, and then he moved on. Orange County-based choreographer Jennifer Backhaus' Backhausdance had a period where chairs were frequent props in her award-winning dances, but she too seems to have moved on. Her most recent fascination is with lights. Her commission last year for the Los Angeles Ballet brought back 1960s Las Vegas with era-appropriate lamp shades suspended above the dancers. Her latest, a full-evening titled Incandescent, brings bare bulbs, incandescent, of course, suspended above 20 dancers. In a recent interview, Backhaus described the title as reflecting her fascination with more abstracted exploration of illumination and its decreasing presence into shadow and darkness. Time to check out her latest and her first full-length.

Fri., May 21, 8 p.m., 2010

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