City of Dance

With its “sprawl to the wall” density, the city of Los Angeles seems a good fit for democratizing dance, i.e., presenting site-specific movement in an array of venues—both indoors and out—all free to the public. Indeed, Benjamin Millepied, the founder of L.A. Dance Project, began the series in the French capital with his Paris Dance Project in 2024, then called La Ville Dansée, with the idea of exporting it to his adopted city in a co-production.

L.A. Dance Project’s City of Dance, Grand Avenue, Los Angeles. Photograph by Gary Leonard

The US premiere, which opened in L.A. June 2 and continues through June 21 in locations that have included Century Park and Santa Monica’s Tongva Park, with upcoming sites as disparate as the Hollywood Forever cemetery and the Los Angles County Museum of Art (LACMA), runs about 60 minutes and features 15 dancers and five choreographers: Dimitri Chamblas, Madeline Hollander, Jamar Roberts, Pam Tanowitz and Millepied. Set to Philip Glass’s minimalist score for Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 award-winning film, Koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi word that translates as “life out of balance,” the dance is alternately gorgeous, surprising and visceral.

The documentary, with its rhythmically propulsive soundtrack, proved the impetus to create the work, with Millepied saying in a press release, that the piece is “defined by the velocity of technology and the toll it exacts on nature, on society, on us, and is as urgent today as the day it was made. Perhaps more so.”

With each choreographer having selected a segment of the score to create their own dance, 51-year-old Dimitri Chamblas, who has known Millepied since he was 14 and they were both at the National Conservatory of Music and Dance in Lyon, France, said that the piece has “a lot of emotions. It’s not a narrative and you couldn’t tell a story, but you have movements that are close to love. Some are physical kinds of fighting situations, some others are super tender. The dance is what being together can mean in various and poetic ways.”

Chamblas, who moved to Los Angeles in 2017 to become the dean of dance at California Institute of the Arts and served in that position until 2023, said that his three sections were inspired by both the music and the film that “really tells us so much about humanity and disaster, the environment, industry, some types of capitalism. Each choreographer had a different resonance with the film, but it's one art piece that we built together.”

No stranger to outdoor performances, Chamblas once choreographed, “Hhumann” (2017), a work for 75 dancers that was performed on the steps and sidewalk surrounding Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown L.A., with “City of Dance,” also making use of Grand Avenue in the current project. He pointed out that one appealing aspect for him, is that a “kind of global community is being built. People come and show up without knowing a dance is happening.

“All of these people are here for different reasons,” he added. “But because of the power of music and the choreographies, it really makes one single community for an hour, where people who don’t know each other are here and are together. I love that.”

Of course, when performed at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where stars such as Judy Garland, Burt Reynolds and Jayne Mansfield have been laid to rest, “the ambiance,” Chamblas noted, “is going to be different. All the spaces are very diverse, but what I like is how an audience feels the space differently, and is able to experience how they feel differently, how they see the dance differently, and how the global experience then is also different. I would really encourage people, if they if they have time, to come and see the show in different locations.”

L.A. Dance Project’s City of Dance, Century Park, Los Angeles. Photograph by Josh Rose

Los Angeles-born Madeline Hollender, whose work explores the evolution of human body movement and the intersection between choreography and visual art, said that while she’s created a number of site-specific dances, she usually adds the music last. In this case, she made the dance to the score and was assigned the sections dubbed, “Clouds” and “Resource.”

She explained: “It's really about the architecture, the site and the concept, and this was kind of the other way around. I started from the visuals and tried to just wrap my head around, “What if this film was seen today, in 2026, versus 1982,” and what these images would mean: how our notions of modernity, industry and nature, and how the organic and inorganic have completely transformed.

“I kind of went down a wormhole,” Hollender elucidated, “of how all these notions of the inorganic—these trucks, this pollution, these agricultural grids, the traffic—how all of a sudden they feel very analog in relationship to the type of modernity we're immersed in right now, with AI and our digital landscape. So, I was thinking about that, as well as just the words, ‘clouds’ and ‘resource.’”

She pointed out that when she was looking and thinking about clouds, she ended up getting inspired by different types of birds, and “things that know clouds – airplanes,” adding, “I’ve choreographed a lot of machines that fly. This is the first time that I was really interested in what I can see out my window.”

As part of her process, Hollender also looked at footage of choreographies throughout history. “From “Sleeping Beauty’s” “Bluebird,” Merce [Cunningham’s] “Beach Birds,” Stravinsky’s “Firebird.” There were countless references, and I was pulling them all together and creating flying-inspired choreography.”

The 40-year-old also ventured into what she called a more “predatorial dynamic, and the types of movements of, say, a hawk. When things have a little bit more peril, and it's not like a free, floating or gliding sensation, you actually have to be wary and work together and collaborate and protect each other, because there are birds of prey out there, as well.”

As Koyaanisqatsi, teems with imagery of machinery, including cranes and construction sites, which abound in Los Angeles—a city slowly becoming verticalized like a West Coast version of New York—this was the perfect landscape for Hollender to mine. “A lot of those tools and trucks and tractors and scrapers and diggers and drills have all been incorporated into the “Resource” section, too.”

Hollender, who danced professionally with Los Angeles Ballet and Angel Corella’s Barcelona Ballet, as well as having earned a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College of Columbia University in 2008, was keen on the dancers, including locals performing alongside members of LA Dance Project, who are known for their hyper-articulate physical intelligence.

L.A. Dance Project’s City of Dance, Grand Avenue, Los Angeles. Photograph by Gary Leonard

“They can do anything, let’s face it,” she gushed. “It’s important in my work for the dancers to also become authors, choreographers in the piece. Their ideas, their ways of manifesting a concept into physical movement is patchworked into the composition as a whole.

“I enjoy workshopping with them,” she continued, “to develop a vocabulary of movements that I suture together. It’s more like a corporeal collage, as opposed to creating movement out of thin air. They’re really wonderful at that. They also have the ability to become pedestrian, which is very important in my work, because I want there to be a spectrum—from the everyday person walking down the street to the most explosive, spectacular unhuman performance. The technical moves they’re also able to do are wonderful and encompass both ends of that spectrum.”

In addition, Hollender’s process involved a great deal of sketching and notations, with her observing patterns and systems in the quotidian. She then created and brought these visuals to the studio, where she showed her notebook to the dancers, asking them, for example, “to look at this intricate traffic circle, or this flock of bird patter that I recorded, or this type of storm. Whatever it is, we start to interpret it with our bodies.”

And with “Koyaanisqatsi” meaning “life out of balance,” Hollender understands that notion on both an intuitive and physical level. “I'm a mother; I have two kids, but one's a baby, so my life has felt extremely out of balance,” she explained with a chuckle. “Really understanding that in a different way, where that's actually not a negative thing, it's something that you have to become more and more comfortable with and agile with.

“For me, the question of when there is entropy and how do you move through that with a type of grace that is going to be inevitably out of balance—reflecting back on the film and the music—that really struck a resonant tone.”

With L.A. being so fragmented, one wonders if that was a challenge or a blessing for the choreographers. Chamblis acknowledged that it’s one of the reasons he feels attached to his adopted city. “For me, personally, it’s why I’ve been here nine years, and now that I am here, it’s also the mysteriousness of L.A. I still don’t understand what it is about and, I’m fascinated by that.

“When I’m asked,” he continued, “I think I can’t really describe L.A., and that’s what I like. You cannot put a statement on it. I would [make] a parallel with contemporary dance, because when I discovered contemporary dance, I asked my parents, who know a lot about dance, “What is contemporary dance?” and they said, “It’s complex to give one single definition, you cannot just put a sentence telling what it is.

“It’s what you want it to be,” Chamblis opined. “I don’t understand it, and I love being a little lost. It opens so much creativity and inspiration. I love that. It’s the best gift that a city can offer.”

The performance can also offer audiences a chance to “really feel the bodies, feel the movements, and receive beautiful emotions of that huge togetherness within the context of their own city,” Chamblas enthused. “Maybe it’s a way for them to experience their city differently, because of the presence of a group or person moving with them [or] in front of them. It’s like a couple dancing together. If you see that and if you think about it, or you see that in the middle of downtown or with cars and stuff, the context is giving a different meaning to this move.”

Victoria Looseleaf

Victoria Looseleaf is an award-winning, Los Angeles-based international arts journalist who covers music and dance festivals around the world. Among the many publications she has contributed to are the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Dance Magazine and KCET’s Artbound. In addition, she taught dance history at USC and Santa Monica College. Looseleaf’s novella-in-verse, Isn't It Rich? is available from Amazon, and and her latest book, Russ & Iggy’s Art Alphabet with illustrations by JT Steiny, was recently published by Red Sky Presents. Looseleaf can be reached through X, Facebook, Instagram and Linked In, as well as at her online arts magazine ArtNowLA.

comments

Featured

REVIEWS | Gracia Haby

Back to Nature

In the forest, it is never silent. Everything is in transmission with something else, be it tree roots to soil, plants to animals and insects, or warning cries that ripple through the forest when predators approach.

REVIEWS | Gracia Haby

Meeting Point

At the vertical and horizontal intersection of two white lines on a darkened stage, performer Layla Meadows and her corresponding organic outline appears. For this restaging of “Glow,” a work choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek for the Melbourne Festival in 2006, it is Meadows’s time to be scanned and surveyed in this duet between a dancer and a machine.

FEATURES | Victoria Looseleaf

City of Dance

With its “sprawl to the wall” density, the city of Los Angeles seems a good fit for democratizing dance, i.e., presenting site-specific movement in an array of venues—both indoors and out—all free to the public. Indeed, Benjamin Millepied, the founder of L.A. Dance Project, began the series in the French capital with his Paris Dance Project in 2024, then called La Ville Dansée, with the idea of exporting it to his adopted city in a co-production.

FIELD NOTES | Candice Thompson

In the Galleries

In Maia Chao’s “Being Moved,” the audience was ushered up to the 7th floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art in a large, crowded elevator with all sixty or so passengers carrying on conversations at maximum volume.

City of Dance

Victoria Looseleaf

subscribe to the latest in dance

comments

Featured

Back to Nature

Meeting Point

City of Dance

In the Galleries