La Boca

Perhaps the most indelible achievement of "thestreamofconsciousness" at La Boca performance space on Saturday took place while audience members were arriving and buying tickets.

A door slams shut; a lock turns; a room goes dark. That is how the conversation between the long-estranged brothers of "Tetro" begins in Francis Ford Coppola's haunting, beautiful and often frustrating new film. Families, in the cinematic lexicon of the godfather, are made of brutal stuff; love and loyalty are the weapons of choice, secrets are a given, betrayal is everywhere and blood is always drawn.

"Galvanic Murmur," an utterly mesmerizing piece seen over the weekend at La Boca, has only one negative: that it is not being performed nightly--or, at least, on some continuing basis. Its protagonist, Naoyuki Oguri, along with Melinda Ring and Roxanne Steinberg, knows that drama made of small moments observed up close can be the most compelling of all.

When the space next to the sizzling latin club the Conga Room became available, the club's owners snatched it up. They had the music. Now they wanted to add food. La Boca del Conga Room (literally, "the mouth of the Conga Room") opened in November. And all of Latin Hollywood came out to party with the owners, who include actors Jimmy Smits and Jennifer Lopez, comedian Paul Rodriguez, musician Sheila E. and local developer Brad Gluckstein.

La Boca is about to speak. The Spanish name Sarah Elgart adopted for her new performance space translates as "the mouth"--a seemingly odd choice for a choreographer. But let Elgart explain the name's multiple meanings and you find her describing the deeper purpose of her ambitious project. " Mouth not only connotes voice, talking, but more broadly, communication," Elgart says. "This is absolutely fundamental to what we're doing here.

I very much wanted to like this ambitious novel by a good writer, whose previous fiction has garnered deserving praise. "The Geography of Desire" showcases Robert Boswell's virtuosity as a phrasemaker and storyteller, but the book's message is unfortunately skewed by a Latin setting too rarefied to be believed.

When the space next to the sizzling latin club the Conga Room became available, the club's owners snatched it up. They had the music. Now they wanted to add food. La Boca del Conga Room (literally, "the mouth of the Conga Room") opened in November. And all of Latin Hollywood came out to party with the owners, who include actors Jimmy Smits and Jennifer Lopez, comedian Paul Rodriguez, musician Sheila E. and local developer Brad Gluckstein.

Glance into the waters of Argentina's Riachuelo River: The only reflection you're likely to see is one of decades of environmental neglect. It's pitch-black and smells foul. It doesn't move and has no oxygen to sustain life. Rusty parts of sunken vessels or collapsed bridges poke through the glazed, oily surface.

Dances poised on the verge of dream-states and focused by severe spatial restriction made up a stimulating program titled "Clerestory," Friday at La Boca, Sunshine Mission, downtown. Resituating the performance area for each piece, choreographers Melinda Ring, Roxanne Steinberg and Naoyuki Oguri created specific dance environments that heightened the intimacy and sense of flow in their new works.

Superimposing behavioral ages-of-man images onto cycles of nature, Min Tanaka's "Seasons" solo defined inner and outer landscapes with the unsparing intensity that has always characterized the contemporary Japanese butoh idiom. Periodically retreating into the corner of the performance area at La Boca (Sunshine Mission/Casa de Rosas) on Friday, Tanaka pushed and twisted against the walls, intently absorbed in the possible relationships between their unyielding surfaces and his body.

After a pre-holiday opening, when most nights were reserved for private parties, La Boca del Conga Room--literally, the "mouth" of the Conga Room, the restaurant attached to L.A.'s Latin club on Wilshire Boulevard, is in full swing. To open the tropical-themed restaurant, the club's owners (who include actors Jimmy Smits and Jennifer Lopez, comedian Paul Rodriguez and musician Sheila E.) brought in Eric Basulto as chef.

Asia de Cuba de Wilshire: You may not recognize chef Eric Basulto's name, but you may very well know about his work. He helped open Patria in New York City, and most recently he was the corporate executive chef for Asia de Cuba, the Asian Cuban restaurants in ultra-hip hotels in New York City (Morgans Hotel) and L.A. (the Mondrian). He's decided to get into Nuevo Latino cuisine with a new restaurant opening next to the Conga Room (5364 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.).

Perhaps the most indelible achievement of "thestreamofconsciousness" at La Boca performance space on Saturday took place while audience members were arriving and buying tickets.

The legacies of the immigrants, old and new, converge on the streets of this prosperous port city that has been shaped and reshaped by foreign diasporas for more than a century. In La Boca, the historic waterfront enclave of brightly painted tenements founded by Genovese dockworkers and fishermen, the worshipers at Our Lady Mother of the Immigrants church are mostly of Italian and Spanish descent.

Superimposing behavioral ages-of-man images onto cycles of nature, Min Tanaka's "Seasons" solo defined inner and outer landscapes with the unsparing intensity that has always characterized the contemporary Japanese butoh idiom. Periodically retreating into the corner of the performance area at La Boca (Sunshine Mission/Casa de Rosas) on Friday, Tanaka pushed and twisted against the walls, intently absorbed in the possible relationships between their unyielding surfaces and his body.

Glance into the waters of Argentina's Riachuelo River: The only reflection you're likely to see is one of decades of environmental neglect. It's pitch-black and smells foul. It doesn't move and has no oxygen to sustain life. Rusty parts of sunken vessels or collapsed bridges poke through the glazed, oily surface.

A door slams shut; a lock turns; a room goes dark. That is how the conversation between the long-estranged brothers of "Tetro" begins in Francis Ford Coppola's haunting, beautiful and often frustrating new film. Families, in the cinematic lexicon of the godfather, are made of brutal stuff; love and loyalty are the weapons of choice, secrets are a given, betrayal is everywhere and blood is always drawn.

The legacies of the immigrants, old and new, converge on the streets of this prosperous port city that has been shaped and reshaped by foreign diasporas for more than a century. In La Boca, the historic waterfront enclave of brightly painted tenements founded by Genovese dockworkers and fishermen, the worshipers at Our Lady Mother of the Immigrants church are mostly of Italian and Spanish descent.

Dances poised on the verge of dream-states and focused by severe spatial restriction made up a stimulating program titled "Clerestory," Friday at La Boca, Sunshine Mission, downtown. Resituating the performance area for each piece, choreographers Melinda Ring, Roxanne Steinberg and Naoyuki Oguri created specific dance environments that heightened the intimacy and sense of flow in their new works.

Until now, Morleigh Steinberg has been a member of the quartet ISO, that pop-oriented collective with a comic unconscious among other brainy, antic things, traceable to Momix and, earlier, to Pilobolus. This weekend the native Angelena struck out on her own at La Boca and, as could be imagined, found a new creative persona. "XRAYD," an extended solo, veered toward the surreal underside of irrationality that ISO had only briefly hinted at before.