Dance in L.A

CalArts Dean of Dance, Dimitri Chamblas

WORDS Héloïse Hakimi Le Grand

PHOTO Katerina Papanikolopoulos

Los Angeles is not the city one immediately thinks of when talking about dance. But with more choreographers, innovative dance schools, and renowned arts institutions moving here, LA is truly becoming a dance capital, rivaling cities such as New York or Paris. Truly interdisciplinary and diverse in its styles and communities, Los Angeles is inventing the dance of tomorrow. We explore our city’s dance scene through interviews that reflect the mindset of a foreign choreographer and dance school dean, Dimitri Chamblas, a dance student and hip-hop dancer, Alex Almaraz, and an arts institution programmer and curator, Amanda Hunt.

DIMITRI CHAMBLAS

Dimitri Chamblas is a French dancer and choreographer. Trained at the Paris National Opera, he performed in numerous contemporary dance companies and created the “Third Stage”, a digital space for dance creation. He was recently appointed Dean of Dance at CalArts [California Institute of the Arts].

To many people, Los Angeles is becoming a dance capital. What is so special about L.A. for dance? What is happening in the L.A. dance scene right now?

There’s a real momentum for dance in Los Angeles right now. There are a number of artists like William Forsythe, Benjamin Millepied, Lil Buck, Aszure Barton who are not from L.A. but who came here because this city has all of the elements that can build what dance is today. Today’s dance collaborates with technology, cinema, and visual arts but is also linked to yoga and meditation. And all of that is in California. Dance is everywhere; a cell phone can be a stage, the street can be a stage, the city of Los Angeles can be a stage, magazines, movies, museums can be stages. All of those territories for dance have to be explored and L.A. has everything to do that.

What about CalArts convinced you to leave France? What makes this school so interesting for dance education?

CalArts is the embodiment of everything I just mentioned. What I love about CalArts is that you come in as a dancer but that through our curriculum you get to not only study and practice dance but to explore dance and animation, dance and experimental drawing, dance and cinema, dance and photography, dance and musical composition… This allows students to first and foremost familiarize themselves with what makes dance today but also discover what other disciplines they are interested in making dance with. CalArts allows one to experiment with every territory within dance underneath the same roof. And this does not exist anywhere else. CalArts is a place where you can say “I am a dancer and my next choreography will be a book” and people will think it’s normal. CalArts knows how to create new artistic and pedagogic forms, how to create a dance school that corresponds to what dance is today and that will invent the dance of tomorrow. Nowadays, a dancer dances, choreographs, makes movies, writes books, creates exhibitions… What is the Los Angeles dance audience like? Is it more important to mix dance with other mediums here than it is in other cities?

Obviously the Los Angeles audience does not exist, L.A. has multiple audiences. I feel there is a whole conservative fringe that goes and sees the dance they want to see, they already know it and they just want to see it again. But there are also people who want to see something they have never encountered, and that’s specific to Los Angeles. They are okay with being lost. They like to be surprised. Here, the more singularity and newness there is to a dance piece, the more people are going to like it. But the real common denominator to Los Angeles is that people love projects that are visible, that are big, that are spectacular. But that can take endless numbers of forms and that’s what we need to explore to appeal to L.A. audiences.

You’re exploring dance through new mediums but you are also trying to take dance to the streets of L.A. How are you doing so? Why is it important to bring dance to the actual city of Los Angeles?

What inspired me when coming to Los Angeles was the city itself. It was asking myself “what if the streets were the stage?” What makes L.A. unique is also that it’s hot, it’s sunny, it’s beautiful. But despite that people are not outside. And that shocked me. Not seeing people in the streets, not seeing public performances, not seeing any spaces where people could encounter art unexpectedly. I feel like the streets of L.A. need bodies. So we had this project in December where 70 dancers performed in DTLA, in front of the Walt Disney Concert Hall and I wanted people to drive by and wonder what it was, passerby to stop and share this moment with strangers, workers to look out their windows. I want to shake up the streets with bodies, not only cars. And Los Angeles is so beautiful, seeing dance in those urban landscapes is sublime to me.

The streets of L.A. need bodies.

What role do you think the formal art institutions can play in the Los Angeles dance scene? Are they hindering the evolution of dance in any way? What potential do they have in making dance move forward in L.A.?

I think that there are too many physical foundations and theaters being built in Los Angeles. I will never be opposed to creating new cultural spaces but there are new ways to share culture, to make it more accessible, that need to be invented. For example, Los Angeles is a mobile city and cul

tural structures should be able to move too. I feel like there is a lack of creativity around the physical object of cultural institutions. I would love to see digital foundations, itinerant foundations that would exist within pre-existing institutions, schools, museums, tech companies, or prisons. People here love to be lost and to not understand, they don’t like recurrence, rituals, routines. So as long as we do something unprecedented, Angelenos will come see and enjoy dance.

ALEX ALMARAZ

Alex Almaraz is a fourth year Dance major at UCLA. He has been a member of the LA-based non-profit hip-hop company Versa Style since 2010 and teaches in correctional facilities.

To a number of people, Los Angeles might seem like an unusual choice to study dance. So why Los Angeles, why UCLA to study dance?

L.A. has a large dance community and many companies that are extremely diverse. It is also heavily focused on industry so those who come here are seeking industry and/ or non-profit work. The UCLA Dance major is focused on theorizing and analyzing the knowledge of world arts and culture as well as actually dancing. We get to analyze dance as a practice. For example my work is focused on Arts and Corrections. My research argues that dance enables agency for people that are incarcerated as well as upon release, when they can create agency in their own community.

How do you fit in the L.A. dance scene?

Hip-hop wise, I am known in L.A. People know me by my aka, I go by Swift. But I wouldn’t be known without Versa Style Dance Company. We are a non-profit organization that serves the underserved communities. We go to local schools but we also are a hip-hop theater company. We take true authentic hip-hop movements and we just relay that on stage. That gives it a lot more meaning because we have a theme to focus on, we have a set of emotions tied to it, costumes, lighting…

A lot of LA-based companies, choreographers, and dancers such as the L.A. Dance Project are trying to bring more formally recognized styles of dance to the streets. What do you believe this entails? Even though hip-hop is what I do, I use every single dance form within my own pieces. I’ll go from a patty duke into a chassé. By mixing all of those styles, by bringing ballet and modern to the streets you are creating a new community, you are bringing the underserved communities and the high-class people together, you’re bringing everyone under one roof. But it is important to note that in a way ballet is already in the streets. There are a lot of people from lower income communities who love ballet and who dance it in the streets all the time.

L.A. is so varied that it is extremely hard to define what and who the Los Angeles audience for dance is. In your experience what does the L.A. audience like? What is it looking for?

The L.A. audience is looking at dance as a way to converse. It’s always about what was being said in a dance piece. L.A. is extremely diverse and although it can be segregated at times, when it comes to dance, it’s not. We’re all together. Additionally, I think that L.A. is okay with not understanding what they see because they know that they are all so different and that not everyone can relate to the same dances. But they comment on that and they question it.

New York has the Lincoln Center, Paris has its Opera, most major cities have one dance institution that they are famous for. Los Angeles does not really have that. What role do art institutions play in the L.A. dance scene?

I think that places like the Hammer Museum or LACMA need to stop looking at art and dance as something so prestigious. These places need to bring us in. They need to let us show our art. It would first create a new community but also bring in more people to see LACMA and get an artistic experience. And it would get to show what L.A. is about. We need to all be together as dancers. So ballet should go to our smaller venues and we should go to their big venues to allow diverse communities to be shown and to meet.

More and more people are saying that L.A. is becoming a dance capital. What do you think is happening in L.A. right now that is making this happen? What is it about L.A. that cam make it a major dance city?

Los Angeles has bookings, agencies, a community, diversity, industry, studios. There are also callings for castings all the time. And people want that. Dancers and choreographers are coming here because they know they can make a living here. Dance in L.A. is only getting bigger.

AMANDA HUNT

Amanda Hunt is the Director of Education and Public Programs at MoCA [Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles]. She previously was a curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem and has worked on many projects in Los Angeles such as the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA performance and public art festival.

Working at MoCA, how do you see dance and art institutions working together? What can such formal organizations bring to dance in L.A.?

Being at MoCA and being the director of education and public programs is an opportunity for me to bring dance into more institutional and formal settings. Because I still think that that’s a relationship to be expanded on. The kind of backing provided by such institutions allow for experimentation. It gives space to create what can sometimes be non-finished works. And more institutions are trying to do that. L.A. is in a process of evolution, everything is solidifying. A community of artists, institutions, audiences, performance spaces is building. Maybe it’s not sticking just yet, and maybe that will always be an element true to Los Angeles; you can’t quite fix it in one spot. But we will explore the possibilities within that.

What other ways than institutions can make dance move forward in Los Angeles?

Institutions are just one perspective. The challenge is to make art and dance more accessible. When I talk about accessibility, I am talking about art in public spaces, and that also means dance in public spaces. What can you put outside of the museum, outside of the institution that will capture people? But not in a cheap way. When you encounter art unexpectedly it can be profound, it can be exciting, it can be distracting, and I think that putting people closer to that is extremely important. Because not everyone feels comfortable in the institution. Not everyone can pay the $25 admission to see something. So how can you flip that? That’s really important to me as a curator, as a director of education and as a programmer. We are in downtown and there’s an incredible artistic community here but who else can we touch? Our job is to share culture with others and that’s what I love about I do.

What about L.A. makes it so suitable for dance? Los Angeles is so vast, there is a sense of wild West opportunities that gives creators infinite freedom. There is something epically cinematic about L.A. The sunsets, the vistas, your car always framing things. Those are new territories to explore for dance. Dance can be on billboards, on buses, on stores. That’s another way to make dance more accessible. Los Angeles is also all about marketing and visibility and dance can and has to work within that. It can be everywhere and needs to work with the mobile nature of Los Angeles. And as the director of education I also want to emphasize that dance is not always a performance, it can also be education through larger programs. And if we want more Angelenos to relate to dance I think that it’s something to really focus on. Additionally, L.A. has always been about pioneering and it has a deep history of dance that needs to be acknowledged. Los Angeles’ time is now, forces are coming together.