LOS ANGELES — Bella Lewitzky was a fervently Californian choreographer, a force-of-nature creator who had no particular desire to make it in New York.
Instead, she believed in her own center of choreographic gravity, in Los Angeles. So it seems fitting that “Kinaesonata,” not seen for more than 20 years, has been revived for L.A. Dances, a festival at L.A. Dance Project.
For those not familiar with Lewitzky’s work, which was rarely presented after her company disbanded in 1997, “Kinaesonata,” staged by Walter Kennedy, a former Lewitzky dancer, is a revelation. In this 1970 piece, set to the insistent rhythms and atonal lyricism of Alberto Ginastera’s Piano Sonata No. 1, the dancers move with a deeply rooted, grounded quality that feels very much of its time. But the movement, with its balletic purity of line, its off-center angles and its rapid, joyous flights through space, also feels startlingly vivid and fresh.
The festival, running through Nov. 24, also features eight commissioned pieces, most from Los Angeles choreographers, as well as two works by Benjamin Millepied, the founder and director of the company. It’s a forward-looking enterprise; since starting L.A. Dance Project in 2012, Millepied has maintained that the city is a fertile ground for dance.
But to look forward, you also have to look back, Millepied said after a performance in late October at the company’s studios in downtown Los Angeles. “You can give opportunities and try to nurture a generation of choreographers,” he said, “but it’s important that the audience, dancers and choreographers also get some context, that they see this work and understand there is a history here too.”
Lewitzky, who grew up in San Bernardino, California, trained with, and later danced for, prominent choreographer Lester Horton, who would become a profound influence on the young Alvin Ailey. She ran a company in Los Angeles for three decades and founded dance departments at CalArts and the Idyllwild Arts Academy.
Her company performed on the East Coast for the first time in 1971, and despite an enthusiastic critical response, only a handful of times after that. “Bella wasn’t that interested in performing in New York” or in critical success there, Kennedy said, adding that her attitude was partly a reaction to Horton’s desire to “make it” in New York.
Although known in the dance world, she never achieved the brand-name recognition of her friend and contemporary Merce Cunningham or of other West Coast dance-makers like Simone Forti or Anna Halprin. But judging by “Kinaesonata,” she was a choreographer with a style and technique as decisive and crafted as any of her more celebrated peers.
That style and aesthetic comes from modernism, Millepied said. “It has these formal shapes and geometries that make you think of architects of that time,” he said. “Dancers today want to move like hip-hop dancers; the rigor of this kind of work — the way you move in and out of positions and create shapes — isn’t what might be most exciting to them. But it’s a real education.”
Millepied said he hoped to revive other works by Lewitzky and by other significant California choreographers, like Forti and Halprin. “There has been an important, distinctive modern dance tradition here,” he said. “It’s vital for the young LA choreographers that I want to commission from to see the discipline, the focus, how much craft there is in this work.”
Millepied had been trying to find out more about Lewitzky’s choreography when he discovered the Twitter account of filmmaker Bridget Murnane, who is working on a documentary about her. Murnane sent him several videos, and he immediately picked out “Kinaesonata.” While some Lewitzky works “need a little context,” Millepied said, “this clearly shows the level of her craft and imagination.”
He was less happy with the unitards and black backdrop of the original — “I wanted people to look at the dance without costumes that scream 1970s” — and commissioned artist Charles Gaines to create new scenery and costumes. (This was apparently a bone of contention among Lewitzky loyalists, but the bright color-block shorts and tops, overlaid with transparent mesh, gave the piece a vibrant, crisp feel.)
“Kinaesonata” dwarfed most of the other works that I saw on programs A and B of the L.A. Dances festival. (Program C, which includes “Kinaesonata” and pieces by Tino Sehgal, Madeline Hollander and Millepied, opened in Paris last week and continues in Los Angeles this month.) There were patchily intriguing moments in Shannon Gillen’s “Run From Me,” in Charm La Donna’s “Kora” (which benefited from its wistfully elegant music by Toumani Diabeté), and in the opaquely dystopian “Split Step,” by visual artist Emily Mast and choreographer and director Zack Winokur.
More successful was Kyle Abraham’s “Chapter Song,” a skillful series of vignettes set to Philip Glass (“Einstein on the Beach”), Kendrick Lamar, Barbra Streisand and others. Abraham tucks ballet, hip-hop and a little humor into his piece, which has athletic floor work, slow, precise balances and enigmatic gestures. It doesn’t quite add up, but it’s never dull.
Two L.A. Dance Project company members, Gianna Reisen and Janie Taylor, also created chamber works for the festival. (Five of the festival’s eight commissions are by women.) Reisen, who has choreographed for New York City Ballet, didn’t help herself with a rather undifferentiated violin score by Andrew Bird, but the dynamics and timings of her trio suggested her talent for shape and composition.
Perhaps the greatest surprise of the festival was Taylor’s “Adagio in B Minor,” a duet set to Mozart’s piece for solo piano. Taylor, a former principal dancer with New York City Ballet, has never choreographed before; in a conversation from Paris, she said Millepied “drew it out of me” after she had created a duet during an improvisation session.
But her “Adagio,” which she performed with the marvelous David Adrian Freeland, is a small gem, full of charm and surprise. Taylor suggests the courtesy of ballroom dancing, the awkwardness of first encounters, and the way that ballet’s formality can both channel and mask emotion. And it has a beguiling, unexpected ending that feels musically perfect. Like “Kinaesonata,” it conveys the joy of dancing and the artistry of dance-making.
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L.A. Dances Festival: Through Nov. 24 at L.A. Dance Project, Los Angeles; ladanceproject.org
This article originally appeared in
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