Troupe

For 25 years, the Segerstrom Center for the Arts has been Southern California's preeminent presenter of dance, hosting more than 50 national and international companies. These troupes have appeared most often, with the number of appearances through the 2010-11 season: 21 -- American Ballet Theatre 7 -- San Francisco Ballet 6 -- Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg; Joffrey Ballet; Kirov (now Mariinsky) Ballet 5 -- New York City Ballet 4 -- Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre; Bolshoi Ballet; Royal Ballet

While more conventionally established poets held readings on the nearby Poetry Stage at the L.A. Times Festival of Books on Saturday, teenage poets drew their own audience as they performed original and classic poetry in front of the Get Lit -Words Ignite booth. The festival continues Sunday at USC. During the outdoor performances, each teen ratcheted up the emotion of the preceding performer, sustaining an energy that drew festival attendees who couldn't help but stop to absorb the experience.

LOCAL Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company It's been more than 10 years since Jones brought his controversial AIDS-related production "Still/Here" to Southern California. Now he's coming back with the West Coast tour of "Fondly Do We Hope . . . Fervently Do We Pray," a new work that expresses the choreographer's shifting views of Abraham Lincoln. Jones, who won a Tony for "Spring Awakening," is blogging about the rehearsal process at fondlydowehope .com. Irvine Barclay Theatre, Oct. 9 Cirque du Soleil's 'Kooza' Sure to be one of the hot tickets of the fall -- and one of the most expensive too -- this new production by Cirque du Soleil will play at the Santa Monica Pier, where the company plans to erect a big-top tent on a four-acre space.

The dance creations of Jabbawockeez will be celebrated in a new Las Vegas theater when the troupe moves to the Luxor Hotel and Casino starting May 18. When it opens in the new, 830-seat, amphitheater-style venue, the group will deliver a revamped production that will incorporate chart-topping music and original tracks by the Bangerz , the company's own recording artists. The dancers don white gloves and expressionless masks to shift the audience's attention away from individual performers and toward the unified group.

The dance creations of Jabbawockeez will be celebrated in a new Las Vegas theater when the troupe moves to the Luxor Hotel and Casino starting May 18. When it opens in the new, 830-seat, amphitheater-style venue, the group will deliver a revamped production that will incorporate chart-topping music and original tracks by the Bangerz , the company's own recording artists. The dancers don white gloves and expressionless masks to shift the audience's attention away from individual performers and toward the unified group.

Dance is often called an art form for the moment, but Merce Cunningham was always planning ahead. In June, the choreographer announced an initiative called the Living Legacy Plan that would safeguard his work and provide for a smooth transition of assets in the event that he should no longer be able to serve as leader of his New York-based dance company. It was an innovative move in a career marked by innovation.

LONDON - Posthumus, the protagonist of Shakespeare's "Cymbeline," marched through the Herculean columns of the Globe theater, stopped abruptly at the front of the stage and looked up at an audience of hundreds - most of whom didn't speak a whisper of the language they were about to hear. His voice boomed, and he raised his arms and curled his hands into fists. "All these people have come from the newest country in the world," shouted actor Francis Paulino Lugali in Juba Arabic, "and this country is South Sudan!"

Sushi Gallery's Festival of the New Arts--Neofest--will present the first American performance by El Cuerpo Mutable, a Mexico City-based dance theater troupe that musters a wide range of movement, mime, music, gesture, props and theatrical elements into the service of its art. Thursday and Friday performances will be at Sushi downtown. The troupe will feature the critically acclaimed, full-length work titled "The Morning After," created by the company in 1983.

A 35-member Grand Kabuki company from Japan will perform two dance-dramas at the Japan America Theatre from Sept. 3-7, The Times has learned. The six performances scheduled here will follow the Kabuki contingent's eight-day engagement (Aug. 23-30) at Expo 86 in Vancouver and a single performance (Sept. 1) in Seattle.

While local balletomanes cheer ballerina Cynthia Gregory and friends tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, a modest, home-grown troupe will make the first appearance by a local dance group in the Costa Mesa facility's smaller black-box theater. But Dance Kaleidoscope and Gregory, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, won't be competing for the same audience, says Susie Vanderlip, business manager for the Tustin-based troupe.

MOSCOW - If spring is a season of rebirth, it seems appropriate, if coincidental, that the Bolshoi Ballet is hoping to move past its recent and ugly scandal with performances of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," a dance about the healing power of nature and art. The Bolshoi Theatre festival "The Age of the Rite of Spring - the Age of Modernism" opens this week without its artistic director, Sergei Filin, who had designed the three-week celebration, one...

ROME - "For our next play, it's either Xenophon, Aristophanes or 17th century French comedy - and I would like some opinions," said the director to his troupe. The actors sitting around a theater in Rome had just settled in to discuss future projects - and to mull over how the last production they participated in became a film that had narrowly missed out on being an Oscar nominee. Keeping an eye on proceedings was a guard, since every performer was a convicted mobster or drug trafficker and the theater was in Rome's high-security Rebibbia prison.

At first blush, "Ganesh Versus the Third Reich" sounds like a long-lost Monty Python skit about some bizarre time-tripping action-figure wrestling bout. Indeed, as the title hints, a cosmic smackdown between the pachyderm Hindu god and the German Führer takes center stage in the production from Australia's Back to Back Theatre company, which on Thursday opens a four-night run at UCLA's Freud Playhouse. But that epic confrontation is only one thread in the show's imaginative tapestry.

For 31 years, Raiford Rogers has given Los Angeles distinctive chamber ballets, immediately recognizable for their linear designs, meditative minimalism and musical acumen. Seeing how we like round numbers for anniversary parties, a celebration would have been warranted at last year's Raiford Rogers Modern Ballet concert. But that one fell on Carmaggedon weekend, turning attendance into a bit of a car wreck (to go with the metaphor). So what the heck, let's commemorate now. The company's annual gig took place Saturday at Luckman Fine Arts Complex, and Rogers and his 11 dancers premiered two pieces and reprised two others.

On the surface, Cate Blanchett would seem to be the least Chekhovian human being on the planet. No idle longing for Moscow for this international stage and screen star, whose frequent flier mileage must have broken the million mark since she and her husband, writer Andrew Upton, took over the Sydney Theatre Company in 2008 and became intercontinental barnstormers. Yet there she is, this paragon of professional fulfillment, garnering raves at home and abroad for her performance in Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" as a trophy wife who has backed herself into a domestic corner by marrying a cranky codger professor.

Moscow's mighty Bolshoi Ballet, the brash and emotionally outsized one of Russia'stwo historic companies, inspired a déjà vu experience of bittersweet intensity with its return Thursday to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Onstage was Yuri Grigorovich's "Swan Lake," closing out this season's Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center series (through Sunday). Grigorovich ruled the Bolshoi as director and chief choreographer for 30 long years, finally stepping down from the top position in 1995.

For three weeks, Company of Characters performed its version of "Fiddler on the Roof" to nearly sold-out crowds. Not an unusual accomplishment for the Studio City-based theater troupe--except that its rendition of the 1964 musical wasn't staged for English-speaking groups, but as part of an exchange tour to the Soviet Union. "The people were wonderful and really reached out to the Americans. It was very heartwarming," said participating actor Laura Ford.

You've heard of the Pasta brothers, Rigatoni and Vermicelli? Wait until you catch their run-in with the Countess Provolone. Sound a little cheesy? Maybe so, but the latest production of Actors for Children, "Professor Zucchini's Traveling Tales," is more fun than a pineapple pizza. The show begins its two-month tour of Ventura County schools, libraries and recreation centers April 5. The professor and his entourage have 27 performances scheduled.

LONDON - Posthumus, the protagonist of Shakespeare's "Cymbeline," marched through the Herculean columns of the Globe theater, stopped abruptly at the front of the stage and looked up at an audience of hundreds - most of whom didn't speak a whisper of the language they were about to hear. His voice boomed, and he raised his arms and curled his hands into fists. "All these people have come from the newest country in the world," shouted actor Francis Paulino Lugali in Juba Arabic, "and this country is South Sudan!"

Renae Williams Niles is a name that stirs little recognition, but she is the most powerful person in dance in Los Angeles. It is her job, as director of programming, to select the companies and repertory for each season of Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center. But that description sells short her impact and influences in this city's dance life. Niles is highly regarded for her business acumen and knowledge of the art. Her unpretentiousness and sunny disposition have also won her fans.