Daniel Ezralow, Choreographer of Sochi Olympics Opening Ceremonies, Launches "Ezralow Dance" Company in L.A.
Los Angeles-based choreographer Daniel Ezralow will debut his new dance company, "Ezralow Dance," with a commissioned, site-specific world premiere at the Ford Amphitheater in Hollywood on September 13 at 8:00 p.m. Ezralow is world-renowned for his choreography and aerial choreography for the Sochi Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies, Cirque du Soleil and the Broadway show Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.
Ezralow has also choreographed for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Batsheva Dance Company and the Paris Opera Ballet. He is a co-founder of ISO Dance and an original dancer/choreographer of MOMIX.
Ezralow has said that one of his reasons for creating Ezralow Dance is to provide a home for all of his choreography work.
"With this new company of 9 dancers, I want to build a creative home for the huge amount of repertory I've developed around the world," he said. "Being an eclectic artist means that I've been lucky enough to jump from film to TV to stage, but there's been no way until now to collect everything into a single body of work."
The choreography for the September 13 program will be intimately linked to the music, played by wild Up, an adventurous chamber ensemble directed by Christopher Rountree.
The evening will begin with the "Awakening" of the Ford's historic outdoor amphitheater, which is set against a backdrop of cypresses and chaparral in the Hollywood Hills, and close with a sequence tentatively titled "DEconstruxion."
The program includes the premiere of a new Bach deconstruction by Chris Kallmeyer (composer of the Bach As A Lens series) and a performance of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #3 played by a completely different set of instruments than those Bach would have used, which will make the familiar piece sound wildly different and virtuosic. The two Bach pieces will "bookend" the evening.
Also on the program will be dances choreographed to various 19th century composers as well as to the music of contemporary composer David Lang.
"This type of collaboration happens very rarely," Rountree said in a statement. "We're going to take old world music and adapt it to become something completely new. We define a concert as anything that draws people together to have a shared experience of listening, so this experiment is very exciting for us."
The September 13 program is the final performance in the Zev Yaroslavsky Signature Series and will bring the Ford Theatres 2014 Summer Season to a close. More information about this program is available at FordTheatres.org.