With the amount of great art and theatre available in Los Angeles, it can be easy to take what we have for granted. It’s simple to forget just how much variety is available in such a wide range of subjects, even including things like opera and ballet. It can be easy to let some of those performances drop off your radar, if they even hit it in the first place.
The American Contemporary Ballet’s Inferno and Burlesque are worth chasing down.
Each piece is comprised of a series of vignettes, Inferno covers memorable sections of Dante’s most enduring work through dance while Burlesque offers several different burlesque performances filtered through the lens of ballet.
Those individual pieces work to create a feeling more than any straight forward story, ranging from beautiful to frightening, from uncomfortable to sad, each bringing something different to the foreground. That serves to create a distinct variety through the short dances, giving you just enough to enjoy before shifting into something else. Both pieces make strong use of ensemble, duet, and solo performances to change gears throughout, and then they each have their own ways of throwing something new at you.
In some cases those shifts take the form of how they play with the lighting. The final scene of Inferno uses a lighting technique that gives it a strikingly gorgeous and haunting quality as two dancers weave in, out, and around it to complete Dante’s journey out of Hell. Burlesque’s changes are more obvious given the nature of that show,with each scene comes a new distinct costume and a different style of burlesque dance.
What makes the two shows so unique though, is the performance space.
The most noticeable aspect is the incredible panoramic view of Los Angeles from the 32nd floor of a building downtown. It’s all city lights and skyscrapers and urban sprawl, LA laid out before you. Those sights serve as the backdrop for the ballet and give the proceedings a surreal quality that can adapt to the show. With Inferno those twinkling lights work as a juxtaposition against the descent into Hell, while in Burlesque they complement the work by giving it a the feeling of a high end club.
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That isn’t the only unique part of the space that the American Contemporary Ballet stages their shows in though. The room on that 32nd floor looking out over Los Angeles has no stage, everything is performed mere feet away from the audience. With just three rows bordering the length of the stage, there’s no bad seat in the house as the company makes use of the entire stage.
As someone with no real experience or understanding of dance, removing that barrier and being able to see the dances up close was fascinating. It felt like it made it more accessible to someone unfamiliar with the medium. Being able to see the dancers, their expressions, and their movements so clearly helped to bring me in to the show in a way that watching from much further away wouldn’t have allowed.
That lack of distance also gives the audience a sense of just how much power and grace the dancers have. With minimalist costumes throughout, you can see their muscles flex and tighten as they hold difficult poses with the stillness of a statue, you get a sense of just how high they’re jumping, how fast they’re moving, and the precision of their movements through the choreography. It makes the hours and hours of difficult work that these dancers must put in as clear as day.
Bringing it in close like that also made the work feel more impactful. Whether it was Francesca and Paolo’s doomed love affair playing out or Satan’s long fingers beckoning the audience further into her circle of Hell it was easier to see the connection between the actors or even to feel the connection between performer and audience.
The same goes for the sequences in Burlesque. There the impact is different, designed to push in different, sometimes more uncomfortable directions as scenes unfold with agonizing slowness. Maybe you’ll end up holding your breath through the whole of the second sequence without realizing it like I did or be captivated by the beauty (and what could be a dark undercurrent) of what’s best described as a reverse striptease.
Part of the lure of the American Contemporary Ballet is seeing ballet in an unusual venue that also puts the dances and dancers right in front of you. Those elements serve to enhance the production in a number of different ways, but they would just be window dressing if the shows themselves didn’t live up to the space’s lofty heights. Inferno and Burlesque do get up there, while working together with the space to keep something that can seem inaccessible within reach.
American Contemporary Ballet’s Inferno and Burlesque run through October 31st in Downtown Los Angeles. Tickets are $45–95.
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