Dance

Four mornings a week, an SUV with darkened windows bears Michael Jackson through the gates outside a nondescript building near the Burbank airport. He spends the next six hours on a soundstage in the company of 10 dancers and pop music's best-known choreographer. The details of rehearsals for Jackson's upcoming concerts in London are closely held secrets, but what's at stake for him is not.

The way people move is as unique as their DNA -- indeed, it is their DNA in action, living proof of their singularity. But most dancers have to give it up to become professionals, to lose themselves in the style of a school, a choreographer, a company, an image of unanimity. Not Michael Jackson. It was his supreme achievement as a dancer to remain indomitably himself and, in the process of entertaining us, to offer a vision of expanded human potential. What's more, long before excesses and obsessions claimed him, he helped turn MTV into DTV, making television the place where dance films set to new music inspired a generation with their creative power and originality.

With a dozen high-def cameras and a couple of camcorders, plus pens, notebooks, sketch pads and laptops, more than 40 people spent three recent weeks in a black-box theater on the campus of UC San Diego documenting what was occurring there. The object of their study was notoriously elusive: dance and the process of choreographic creation. What happens, they wondered, when choreographer Wayne McGregor creates movement on (through? with?

Kevin Tancharoen, the 25-year-old director behind the recently released remake of "Fame," wasn't even born when Alan Parker's original film stormed theaters back in 1980 and became part of the cultural conversation. The movie, about a group of down and dirty kids struggling to make it in New York's High School for the Performing Art, was the original anti-"High School Musical." It wallowed in the grittiness of a pre-Giuliani New York, back when talented kids still dreamed of honing their craft and hoofing it on Broadway, rather than just becoming an instant YouTube celebrity.

In a way, Guillermina Quiroga has Ronald Reagan to thank for transforming her into an internationally acclaimed tango dancer. If she hadn't been in front of a television as a young woman in Argentina watching the 1985 U.S. presidential inauguration, she would have missed "the couple performing tango for the president. When I saw these people dancing, I got crazy," she says. "I wanted to do this dance so badly, but I didn't have the courage then."

On a dreary, gray day in March 2008, choreographer Bill T. Jones spoke to a small group of well-wishers in the home of businesswoman Desiree Rogers on Chicago's Near North Side. Tinkling ice, urbane chitchat and cognoscenti goodwill defined the party up to that point, Rogers' smart modern art collection the backdrop. Then Jones took the floor to discuss his assignment to create a full-length dance-theater piece about Abraham Lincoln for the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Ill. "I want to feel Lincoln in this very room," he said, looming in the hush that followed as a momentary conjurer or even seance medium.

In the old days, the ballet company would come to town, the theater would sell tickets, the dancers would dance, the audience would applaud, and everyone (hopefully) went home happy. But in these recessionary, interactive times, those rules don't apply anymore. As the numbers of subscribers and ticket buyers decline, dance groups are looking for enticements, beyond actual performances, to get audiences to queue up at the box office. Which is the driving force behind the Trey McIntyre Project Residency at the Orange County Performing Arts Center today through Saturday.

Stop! Hammer Time! Again! MC Hammer (born Stanley Burrell), the guy who made millions with songs such as "U Can't Touch This," then squandered it away, then became a televangelist, then -- oh, please, did you live in a cave from 1988 to 1996? Anyway, he's back, and this month the 45-year-old is launching DanceJam.com, a user-generated community featuring slo-mo tutorials, dance history and videos of some 150 dances from capoeira to pop 'n' lock.

DIANA VISHNEVA would seem to have it all. A principal with the venerable Kirov Ballet since 1996, the Russian dancer blessed with an uncommonly supple body, superb technique and a vivid dramatic presence appears routinely on the world's prestige stages. She's won praise not only in such classics as "Giselle" and "Swan Lake" but also in George Balanchine's neoclassical masterpiece "Jewels." But at the relatively young age of 31, this St. Petersburg-born ballerina wants more.

Spreading across the Southland in an intricate web of highways and byways, Los Angeles is not an easy place to get to know, let alone love. Compared with other urban regions, its size and sprawl can frustrate a newcomer's efforts to grasp the totality of the city. Yet for choreographer Stephan Koplowitz, who relocated here two years ago after living in Brooklyn, N.Y., for 24 years, becoming acquainted with L.A. has been a welcome surprise.