Ann Haskins

Almost all dance fans can recount, usually in delicious detail, a pivotal experience that forever hooked them on live dance performance. Presenters trying to retain existing fans and entice new ones into braving clogged freeways should take a page from this new festival offering $10 tickets to see 10 premier......

Definitely not a household name here, but in England Richard Alston has been a major player on the contemporary dance scene for nearly 30 years as a choreographer, director of the Rambert Dance Company and, since 1994, director of his own eponymous troupe. RADC made a splash with its New......

Launching the Music Center’s fifth dance season with fireworks — well, freeze-frame fireworks — it’s the West Coast premiere of video artist David Michalek’s Slow Dancing: mesmerizing giant slow-motion video images of dancers that include luminaries from ballet and modern dance, as well as hip-hop artists, tappers and classical dancers......

In 1999, not knowing any better, dance fan Howard Ibach decided to organize the first Los Angeles Dance Invitational (LADI) to raise funds for programs benefiting gay and lesbian youth. He recruited an eclectic array of tap, contemporary, ballet, jazz and street dancers for a rollicking event that took root......

Long before magical realism and gymnastic pretzel moves became ubiquitous in dance theater, local choreographer/performer Linda Lack and her Two Snake Studio introduced Los Angeles audiences to an evocative brand of modern dance that conjured up a realm of mystical and semirealistic creatures, through her use of masks as well......

Bollywood comes to Hollywood as choreographer Achinta S. McDaniel and her 25-member Blue13 Dance Company offer a contemporary spin on the Lewis Carroll classic, Alice in Wonderland. Over the past eight years, the ensemble has built an enthusiastic following with performances ranging from classic kathak, bharatanatyam and bhangra dance from......

As midsummer temperatures spike, this Santa Barbara–based chamber ballet company promises to kick it up more than just a notch with Carmen, choreographer William Soleau’s new take on Bizet’s quintessential Spanish vixen. Artistic director Rodney Gustafson and his ensemble have toured the borders of L.A. in recent years, visiting outlying......

A dozen years before he established what became the New York City Ballet, George Balanchine brought classically trained dancers and a jazzy brand of ballet into the spotlight of Broadway in the 1936 musical On Your Toes. Balanchine’s legendary “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballet sequence was a breakthrough use of......

In the 10 years since she founded the troupe, Kitty McNamee has built Hysterica Dance Company into a major force on local stages, recruiting a fistful of dedicated dancers and assembling a band of edgy collaborators, including co-artistic director and resident costume designer Ryan Heffington. McNamee’s expressive choreography has put......

The adventurous troupes assembled for the three-week New Original Works (NOW) festival have nothing in common. Nothing, that is, except a shared commitment to experimenting with innovative ways to combine dance, theater, music and other performance elements. For example, in this week’s program, Collage Dance Theatre blends dance, theater, text,......