Ping Chong

" 'Kwaidan' is a project I've wanted to do for 20 years," theater director Ping Chong says of the famous collection of traditional Japanese ghost stories, four of which were made into the 1964 film "Kwaidan." "I saw the film, then I read the book."

" 'Kwaidan' is a project I've wanted to do for 20 years," theater director Ping Chong says of the famous collection of traditional Japanese ghost stories, four of which were made into the 1964 film "Kwaidan." "I saw the film, then I read the book."

* Festival Ballet Theatre dances "The Nutcracker," Dec. 2-3 at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 Atherton St., Long Beach. $18 to $22. (562) 985-7000. * "Ennio: Starring Ennio Marchetto," Italian comedian-performance artist Marchetto's solo, multi-character comedy opens next Thursday at the Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Ends Dec. 31. $20 to $42. (310) 208-5454. * "Swing!," the acclaimed song-and-dance celebration, opens Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N.

Two Los Angeles-based artists -- jazz musician Billy Childs and theater director John Malpede -- are among the 20 recipients of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards for 2013.  The recipients, whose names were announced this week, will each receive an unrestricted grant of $225,000 over a period of  three to five years. An additional $50,000 is available to each of the winners based on other criteria. The award was launched in 2011 with the intent of honoring individuals in the fields of theater, dance, jazz and related interdisciplinary work.

So much blather about "thinking outside the box" has corroded our popular culture, it's easy to overlook the potential of thinking if not inside the box, then at least thinking about the box. A box is a wonderfully loaded symbol. It is a visual signifier of both confinement and escape.

You wouldn't expect 90 minutes of Pina-servitude from Meredith Monk or Ping Chong, two of the most intuitively, ruminatively original American artists working in dance-based performance art. But, collaborating in Berlin in 1983, they created "The Games," a hard-edged multimedia spectacle (a k a opera) very much in the shadow of Bauschian Tanztheater .

Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "a colossal soul (who) lies vast abroad on his times . . . and requires a long focal distance to be seen." Jorge Luis Borges claimed that "he would see/That which earthly eyes do not see:/The fierce geometry, the crystal/Labyrinth of God and the sordid/Milling of infernal delights." So enormous was the scientific and spiritual opus of Emanuel Swedenborg that not even the most exalting of Borgesian verse could exaggerate his visionary work.

Movies Richard Lester's 1964 Beatles classic "A Hard Day's Night," in which the lads from Liverpool, above, play themselves, returns Friday to the Nuart for one week with a crisply restored new 35-millimeter print and a digitally remastered soundtrack. * Winner of the best director award in Cannes this year, Edward Yang's "Yi Yi (A One and a Two)" concerns three generations of the Jian family set in contemporary Taipei. It stars Wu Nienjen and Elaine Jin and opens Friday at the Royal in West L.

The scene outside the Brooklyn Academy of Music suggested a political rally rather than an awards ceremony. Self-styled cigarette girls and Marlboro men handed out rolled-up "Helmsboros," flyers calling on Philip Morris to cease supporting Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and urging a boycott of Philip Morris products.

The flap that gripped Baltimore's Theatre of Nations over the exclusion of the National Theatre of Great Britain's production of "Animal Farm" had its reverberations on the ivy-covered Smith College campus here, where the thoroughly American Theatre Communications Group recently held its sixth biennial conference.