Ann Haskins

Pop-up dance performances punctuate the ArtWalk launching this year's Laguna Dance Festival, a 10-day swirl of performances, workshops and master classes. Festival director Jodie Gates has recruited New York City Ballet's Tiler Peck and Joaquin De Luz to headline the festival gala performance (April 14), which includes dancers from Colorado......

A triptych of shorter ballets from three master choreographers is the calling as American Ballet Theatre returns for five performances. Drawing most interest is a new production of The Firebird with former director of Russia's Boshoi Ballet and choreographer-of-the-moment Alexei Ratmansky tackling the luminous Stavinsky score. ABT is spotlighting former......

With the arresting name of Chunky Move, this contemporary dance company from Australia arrives with Connected, where the dancers sharing the stage with an enormous kinetic sculpture by California artist Reuben Margolin. Suspended like a lacy, metallic jellyfish with a fistful of strings, Margolin's construct floats, embraces, influences and participates......

Ronald K. Brown and his ensemble Evidence are pure New York, but credit L.A. for the choreographer meeting Stevie Wonder, who voiced interest in dance being set to his music. That face time led to Wonder's songs fueling Brown's On Earth Together, which receives its West Coast premiere as part......

Just in case anyone doubts Jamie Nichols' ability to assemble some of L.A.'s best dance companies for her annual showcase Celebrate Dance, the Lester Horton Awards honoring L.A. dance bestowed on her the Outstanding Achievement for a Festival three years in a row, plus many of the companies Nichols presented......

The success of the film Black Swan sparked renewed interest in the deeply romantic ballet that inspired the Oscar-winning movie. The new audience piqued by the film can join long-time ballet fans as L.A.'s own professional ballet company unveils a new full-length production of Swan Lake. The choreography from Los......

Be it advertising, politics or popular culture, excessive repetition is accepted as the path to creating a brand, but to create an icon nothing beats a strategic artistic reference. Take Toulouse Lautrec whose posters and portraits of the Moulin Rouge performers and patrons captured the boisterous, bawdy, exuberant excess of......

As if being one of history's great, exotic femme fatales was not enough, pundits and historians recently began reconsidering Cleopatra's talents beyond the bedroom and acknowledging her underappreciated intelligence, political, organizational and management skills. In Cleopatra, CEO, L.A.'s site-specific maven Heidi Duckler has expanded on the legendary Egyptian's newfound leadership......

No glass slipper was required when American movie star Grace Kelly married her Prince Ranier and became princess of Monaco. Choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot, who helms that principality's official ballet company, also saw no need for that ubiquitous shoe in his version of Cinderella, which is the calling card as Les......