Dancers

"Gotta Dance" is a feel-better movie. Warm and cozy with just the tiniest dollop of tension, this documentary will make you feel almost as genial as the 12 women and one man whose dancing adventures it details. Those would be the members of the NETSational Seniors, a minimum-age-60 dance team whose assignment, should they accept it, would be to learn hip-hop moves and perform what they learned in front of 19,000 enthusiastic fans at the Meadowlands Arena, home of the NBA's New Jersey Nets.

Lofty themes and captivating imagery are on display in choreographer Kingsley Irons' "Rupture," which opened the 2009 dance series at Hollywood's Unknown Theater over the weekend. And Derrick Spiva Jr.'s original score, stuffed with gamelan, harp and haunting string sounds, catches the ear. It's too bad, then, that the locally based Irons didn't supply her seven female dancers with a larger movement vocabulary -- a leap, perhaps, some muscular partnering, a vigorous trio or quartet . . . please.

Speaking of his latest work for Israel's Batsheva Dance Company, "Max," Ohad Naharin has poetically referenced the universality of gesture and the essence of being -- the usual sort of statements made about the art of dance that don't really say much of anything. In performance at UCLA's Royce Hall on Saturday evening, the piece was -- gratifyingly -- at once more particular and abstruse, relying as it did on a lexicon of physical gestures that, despite their specificity, added up to gibberish.

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet demonstrated Tuesday, in its second local visit in four years, that it aims to please and entertain, and it is unashamed of those ambitions. In its three-part program at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, this young company of 10, with roots in Colorado and New Mexico, showed an affinity for contemporary ensemble pieces that impress with agreeable visuals. The audience was asked to think, but no feathers were ruffled. The ultimate example was a second helping of Moses Pendleton's crowd-pleasing "Noir Blanc" (seen also in '05 at the Laguna Dance Festival)

A potted plant falls from the heights onto the UCLA Royce Hall stage, galvanizing nine meditative, heavily cloaked Ballet Preljocaj dancers into action. They throw off their weighty covers, glory momentarily in their youthful nakedness, turn upstage to don colorful briefs and muscle shirts, and begin yelping and hooting as they cavort to the music of Vivaldi. Spring has sprung, with a vengeance. So begins Angelin Preljocaj's "Les 4 Saisons . . . ," an 85-minute fantastic excursion through the Red Priest's most famous score, intercut with periods of silence and movements from other, unidentified Vivaldi concertos, including some of the weirder music that the 18th century Venetian composer wrote.

In the 38 years since she founded Ballet Hispanico, artistic director Tina Ramirez has pushed with gusto a credo of all Latino dance all the time, winning her plucky troupe longevity and accolades. The unintended consequences of this smorgasbord approach have been less rewarding. The New York City company has never cleaved an identifiable focus for itself, beyond the overly broad Hispanic label. The repertory is a befuddling mix, which makes it difficult for the 13 dancers to perform it all exceptionally well.

It was not without trepidation in 1984 that I first met Pina Bausch, the revolutionary German choreographer who died unexpectedly Monday at 68. Her Wuppertal Tanztheater was about to make its U.S. debut by opening the Olympic Arts Festival at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, and I asked for an interview. She was unknown in the States, and what I had gathered from a not always admiring European press was that she was angry, violent, feminist, sexually intimidating, emasculating. She said she would speak with me under two conditions: that I travel to Wuppertal, Germany, and that I first see her work.

The program's four dances were over, and the applause faded away. But most of the Saturday-night audience at the Irvine Barclay Theatre remained rooted to their seats. Chairs materialized onstage, and it was time for "Ask the Choreographer," a favorite part of the annual National Choreographers Initiative works-in-progress showing. One man wanted an explanation for dance-maker Rick McCullough's choice of music: a full 15 minutes of air-raid-siren noise (by composer Michael Gordon)

A salsa dance instructor and choreographer on the Fox television show "So You Think You Can Dance" was arrested Tuesday on a felony warrant charging him with sexually assaulting four women. Alex Da Silva, 41, who was arrested at his North Hollywood home, is being held in lieu of $6.2-million bail. The alleged assaults took place between August 2002 and March 2009, according to Jane Robison, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office. She said the victims were either dancers or aspiring dancers who met Da Silva at his dance classes.

Our new president's interest in the lore and legacy of Abraham Lincoln is not exactly a state secret. So when the most prominent and perennially controversial black choreographer on the planet makes a full-evening work about Honest Abe and the link between the dangerous turbulence of his time and ours, head for the storm cellar. Commissioned by the Ravinia Festival as part of its Lincoln Bicentennial Celebration, Bill T. Jones' "Fondly Do We Hope . . . Fervently Do We Pray" arrived at the Granada Theatre on Tuesday as part of the UCSB Arts and Lectures season.