Dance Companies

Choreographers form dance companies to ensure their creative freedom--but, as Twyla Tharp and Bella Lewitzky have detailed in these pages, sustaining those companies immediately becomes their prime task. What happens to creativity when you're constantly touring, teaching, doing interviews and fund-raising? Lar Lubovitch is the latest to rebel against these conditions.

Lewis Segal's Perspective on trading "bootleg" ballet videos brings up crucial questions about copyright law ("Psst--Wanna See a Ballet Video?," Feb. 10), the most important being making art available to the most people while not violating the copyright owners' ability to profit from their work. Since home video became a viable medium in the late '70s, hundreds of bootleg videos have hit the streets. Many violated clearly defined copyrights--and deserved to be stopped. However, many also brought to eager fans films/TV shows/concerts/performances that were thought "lost" or "unavailable."

Los Angeles-based Aman Folk Ensemble will work in modern dance for the first time beginning this spring, collaborating with New York composer-choreographer Laura Dean under the auspices of a new national dance fund. The 24-month project, which will eventually enter Aman's repertory, will be funded by Philip Morris, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts.

As the fine arts specialist for the Ventura County superintendent of schools and as a person deeply involved in the performing arts, I would like to call upon all citizens to express their support of the National Endowment for the Arts. The new Congress will soon vote on whether to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. This organization has made a variety of programs available to our students and the community at large in theater, dance, music, puppetry and storytelling. Without the help of the NEA, I doubt that many of these programs would have been possible at all. Research on the effects of the arts on student achievement indicates that the arts stimulate learning and creativity, improve overall academic performance, develop problem-solving skills, teach discipline, promote teamwork and enhance self-esteem.

At issue is not whether LATC should wholly produce the dance festival--clearly, it can't afford to--but why, of all the performing arts, dance is alone in continually having to rely on self-productions to "get the work out." Dance has unfortunately and unfairly been relegated a secondary-art status in Los Angeles. Unlike the theater and, to a lesser extent, music communities, there is no infrastructure (stages, funding opportunities) that can support the production and exhibition of work by local choreographers and dance companies.

Gus Giordano, a choreographer who popularized jazz dance around the world and earned it recognition as a legitimate art form, died Sunday in Chicago of pneumonia, according to a statement released by his family. The founder of the critically acclaimed Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago, based in Evanston, Ill., Giordano published "The Anthology of American Jazz Dance" in 1975. In 1990, he organized the first Jazz Dance World Congress, which brings together jazz dance companies for a week of master classes and performances.

Maybe it's the economy. Maybe it's that major theaters in Los Angeles are overbooked. Or that the number of sponsors there willing to subsidize dance is shrinking. Or maybe it's the emergence of Orange County as a major force in dance presentation. Whatever the reasons, some of the most important and familiar dance companies are bypassing Los Angeles, dropping the city from their tour schedules or coming far less often, and playing Orange County instead.

With states of agitated emotions, accompanied by the grit of unwavering determination, Francisco Martinez's work "Trilogy," which premiered Saturday at Cal State Northridge's Performing Arts Center, might also be a metaphor for this locally based teacher-choreographer: Francisco Martinez Dancetheatre, now in its 15th year, continues to present inspired work, despite small audiences and the financial challenges inherent in today's dance companies.

Often perceived as passive and politically naive, California dancers are changing that traditional image in realistic and practical ways. To that end, 80 leading members of the state's dance community gathered at UCLA on Wednesday and Thursday for the 1986 Dance California Conference, an annual forum for the exploration of key dance issues, activities and trends.

The biggest story in dance in San Diego in 1992 was the financial failure in October of the San Diego Foundation for Performing Arts. There's no denying the closure was a severe blow to the local scene, but it doesn't mean dance is dead in the city. True, the financial picture remains far from rosy, but a great deal of enthusiasm exists about the dance community's artistic health.