The New Original Works Festival features new dance, theater, music, and multimedia performance works by artists who are known for their often radical and unconventional approaches. While Week One (with work from Maureen Huskey and Killsonic) may have past us by, there’s still time to catch Weeks Two and Three, beginning this Thursday, July 29th.

Three artists make up Week Two of NOW: Christine Marie & Ensemble, in the expressionist theater piece “Ground to Cloud,” uses projections, electric light and shadowplay to unfold a multidimensional mythology of nature and human intervention. Systems of Us, from choreographer Rae Shao-Lan Blum & composer Tashi Wada, explores the disruption and transformation of relationships in a dance collaboration that may call to mind those early experiments of Cage and Cunningham. Finally, master of Breaking and hip-hop dance innovater Raphael Xavier’s “Black Canvas” explores the body of the Breaker in relation to the stage and life.

Week Three, beginning August 5th, features theater, dance, and animation. Alexandro Segade’s “Replicant vs. Separatist” depicts Segade himself calling the shots on a live sci-fi film shoot in which two male couples navigate the murky waters of state-mandated marriage. Hana van der Kolk’s “Once More, Again, One (Solo)” uses familiar pop music as the background for her solo dance adaptation of a work originally conceived for four dancers. To close, animator Miwa Matreyek (of Cloud Eye Control) uses animation with live projection to explore fantastical worlds in “Myth and Infrastructure.”

- By Helen Kearns

Each “week” of NOW is really only a Thurs/Fri/Sat, so budget your time accordingly. If you only attend one more festival this summer, consider the power of NOW. For more information, please visit www.redcat.org, or call 213-237-2800.

This Wednesday, July 28^th at 8:00 PM at the Hollywood Bowl, jazz proves its not dead with the internationally renowned Count Basie Orchestra—still going after eighty years. Known for popularizing the Kansas City-style of big band jazz, as well as initiating some of the greatest artists in history (including Billy Holiday, Jo Jones, and Charlie Parker), Basie, himself, passed away in 1984, but his band plays on under different direction and with a regenerating cast of musicians. The current Orchestra doesn’t strictly adhere to its Kansas City roots (i.e. rhythmic riffs under improvised solos), but instead incoporates more of the East coast, neo-classisist style of big band jazz, with complex arrangements by director Bill Hughes.

That’s not to say, however, that such Count classics as “One O’Clock Jump” or “April in Paris” won’t be bouncing through the Bowl on Wednesday—along with the Dave Holland Big Band, the Dave Douglas Big Band, and yes, maybe you. Due to the overwhelming response of our last giveaways, FineArtsLA.com is once again raffling off two tickets to the Hollywood Bowl to see the Count Basie Orchestra live at 8:00 PM. Just enter your first and last name into the form below, as well as your e-mail address, and you are automatically entered into the running to win not just Wednesday night’s tickets, but also the next three FineArtsLA.com giveaways. So brush up on your two-step, and dust off those dancing shoes; even if you don’t win our contest, you can still buy tickets here.

Fortunately, I have one last chance. This weekend, starting on Friday, but running on Saturdays as well, for five weeks only, the Velaslavasay Panorama opens its doors at 8:00 PM to present the unique and aptly located live performance of The Grand Moving Mirror of California. What is it? Good question. It’s a series of moving painted scenes, which encircle the theatre like a long scroll being rolled out around the audience, and depict the journeys of early American settlers attempting to reach California during the Gold Rush of 1849. Using live narration taken from an actual 19^th century script, along with musical accompaniment and radio-play sound-effects, the show celebrates and revives a 130-year-old mode of entertainment that simply shouldn’t be missed.

Not bad for my last weekend in the neighborhood.

- By Joshua Morrison

For more information about the Union Theatre, the Panorama, or panoramas in general, please visit www.panoramaonview.org, or call 213-746-2166.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Planet Earth, which first premiered on the BBC in 2006, and was re-broadcast in the U.S. in 2007, compiles extraordinary, cinematic scenes of nature from all over the world, in eleven different habitats. It’s probably the best reality show you’ll ever see, if only because it’s completely devoid of humans. Yet, the series is without a doubt a distinctly human feat, and would be half as exciting were it not for the power of a fully human, orchestral score.

And yes, Fine Arts LA has two tickets to give away to hear this score performed live by the LA Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl this Friday, July 23^rd at 8:30 PM, alongside footage from BBC’s Planet Earth. George Fenton conducts, you and your date cuddle up, while the entire audience is transported to the places far beyond even Hollywood’s imagination. Just write in your first name, last name, and e-mail address into the form below, and you can be eligible to receive these Planet Earth passes, as well as the next three ticket giveaways we do. Safe travels.

Whatever meaning you may attach to them, fireworks do possess a universal power. And on this July 4^th, FineArtsLA.com is giving you and a lucky date the chance to witness the magic close-up at the best Independence Day pyrotechnics show this city has to offer. Live at the Hollywood Bowl, with special guest Vince Gill (does is get more patriotic?), and the U.S. Air Force Band of the Golden West (apparently it does), the Los Angeles Philharmonic presents the famous July 4^th Fireworks Spectacular. Simply write in your first name, last name, and e-mail address into the form below, and you will automatically be put in the running to win two free tickets to this year’s show (and as always, your name will be added to the lottery of the next three FineArtsLA.com ticket giveaways).

Sure, you could catch the lights from a distance off the side of the 101. But why not immerse yourself in the Bowl this year, and join the true fireworks show, which of course has nothing to do with gunpowder, but rather the thousands of individual sparks that fly up from our own collective subconscious.

Down Terrace: Bristish writer-director Ben Wheatley first got noticed with a ten-second viral video he made called “Cunning Stunt.” It’s short, one shot, surprising, and insanely realistic. Wheatley borrows this same attitude, storytelling prowess, and predilection for genre-molds to his first feature, Down Terrace, which he shot in only eight days. It tells the tale of a father-son ex-con team who decide to go after the man they think snitched them out. But when a hit-man, his 3-year-old child, and a bossy matron get involved, what could be a simple, maybe humorous crime farce turns ugly, gritty, and extremely dark. Wheatley is the latest figure in the the long-standing “kitchen sink” tradition of British filmmaking, where much like in “Cunning Stunt,” the mundane and passingly familiar transcend into deeper realms.

Mahler on the Couch: It may be the year for ‘famous-figure-meets-other-famous-figure’ biopics. First there’s Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, and then from Germany, there’s Mahler on the Couch, the meeting of composer Gustav Mahler and father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. In this richly stylized interpretation of actual events, writer-director Percy Adlon—who also made Bagdad Café and Sugarbaby—relates the story of the complex, doomed marriage between Mahler (a supposed manic-depressive) and his wife, as seen through the oddly comic psychotherapy sessions with the most influential figure in 20^th century art and thought.

Marwencol: It’s important to see at least one documentary in any film festival, because frankly, they’re usually the best. The 2010 LA Film Fest is certainly not lacking in good-looking docs, either. But Marcenwol is by far the most curious. It’s the story of Mark Hogencamp, who suffered acute brain trauma after being attacked by a group of local teenagers. The damage left him a near-amnesiac, and he was forced to re-construct a new life for himself. This led to Marwencol, a 1/6 scale model of an imaginary, WWII-era Belgian village that Hogencamp took four years to build in his back-yard. He infused intricate storylines for his action-hero and barbie-doll villagers, many of whom stand in for characters in Mark’s real life. And just as anyone who saw Exit Through the Gift Shop can testify, every good story ends with a visit from the imperial art-world.

Café Noir: Even if you don’t speak Korean (which I do not), I recommend watching the trailer to this feature-debut from former South Korean film-critic Jung Sung-Il. The dialogue and action are deliberate and sparse, the photography is beautiful, and the editing destroys any American-borne notion that the more frantic the preview, the better the movie. In this story of unrequited love, Jung Sung-Il instead takes a page from the Godard school of filmmaking, folds it up into an airplane, and flies it over Russia into South Korea. Along the way, he references Bollywood, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Christianity, politics, and the entire history of South Korean cinema. This is a movie that foreign-film buffs, nostaligic French New Wavers, and eager dilettantes like myself shouldn’t miss.

Tiny Furniture: This, in my opinion, is probably going to be the smash-hit of the festival. It’s the semi-autobiographical story of 23-year-old, writer-director-star Lena Dunham, a film-studies post-graudate in search of herself. It co-stars Alex Karpovsky (the lovable romantic lead in my favorite movie of last-year, Beeswax), as well as Dunham’s own sister playing, well, Dunham’s sister. I’ll admit, the bitterness in me arouses suspicions of cliché about this movie, but at the same time, I’m looking forward to a young female-helmed movie that shows off young females in a more realistic light than Juno. Who knows?  It may turn out to be my generation’s The Graduate, or (and what I hope), it will turn out to be something more specific, something personal and true, something a fellow-former film/writing major can watch and say, “that’s interesting.”

The 2010 Los Angeles Film Fest runs until June 27^th. For tickets, times, and more information, please call (310) 432-1240, or visit www.lafilmfest.com.

The Cremaster Cycle is comprised of Barney’s sculpture, photography, drawings, and five feature-length films that Barney created between 1994 and 2002.  The films, whose loose, wordless narratives vary widely, explore the processes of creation in ways that reach far beyond the biological implications (“cremaster” is the term for the muscle that controls testicular response to external stimuli).  Barney spares no expense—he includes everything from an extravagant, Busby Berkeley-esque musical revue in a blue-turf’d football stadium to a high-fashion Western starring Norman Mailer; an epic ascension of New York City’s Chrysler Building, to motorcycle gangs, faeries, magicians, live pigeons, and the Budapest Opera & Philharmonic—I mean, everything. What’s best, the films can be enjoyed individually or as consecutive parts of a whole.

So act fast, folks. These films are rarely screened—especially with the opportunity to see them consecutively. My recommendation would be to take the day off, swing by the 99c store for a few packs of Red Vines, and settle in to the dark theater for a day of gross overstimulation.

The Cremaster Cycle screens at the Nuart from June 11 through the 17^th. Visit the Nuart’s website for ticket information.

In a friendly twist of roles, Koons selected works from Dakis Joannou’s own collection to create a fantastical spectacle that transformed the floors of the New Museum into a fun house of contemporary art: towering sculptures constructed of fragmented matter; a daily performance of a passerby who strips from their street clothes into a loin cloth and crown of thorns, only to hang from a crucifix outfitted with a bicycle seat; and even a full-on chorus of museum guards singing “this is propaganda” in a tone similar to a Gregorian chant.

The fourth floor of the exhibit proves to be the most visually diverse and confounding as the elevator opens and the viewer is aligned with David Altmejd’s The Cave, a towering shard of glass that divides and refracts Charles Ray’s Fall ’91, a female mannequin outfitted in a blue skirt suit.  She would be considered dainty and feminine if not for her enlarged proportions and nine-foot stature.  Positioned directly across from the mannequin is a sparkling and bedazzled streetwalker, Liza Lou’s Super Sister, who cocks a gun against her wide hips.  The positioning seems intentional as it signals hyper femininity and sexuality that become conflated through the single prism of The Cave.

Descending upon each floor, the viewer not only witnesses the complete invagination of the body and its vulnerability, but the viewer themselves become untangled, and unglued in their efforts to gain understanding. The human form is continually considered and reconsidered through a literal and metaphorical dissection of “skin.” Like Urs Fischer’s melting wax sculpture What if the Phone Rings—in a constant state of decay as the candles that are lit inside the mold cause the sculpture to melt and disintegrate on the floor.

Perhaps it is this type of embedded catharsis within “Skin Fruit” that makes it linger with you days after you left the museum, reminding us that art is a living entity which sheds its own skin.

- By A. Moret

Related Los Angeles news:

This Sunday, June 13^th, at 10 AM, the A.N. Abell Auction Co.—a family business run out of the City of Commerce since 1916—will hold its Spring Fine Art and Antique Auction. Normally, this event is the LA Art World’s best kept secret, as it is confined to invitees only. But this year, everyone’s invited. And among the amazing items up for grabs are two exemplary works by iconoclastic, American contemporary artist, Jeff Koons.

You’ll remember Rupert Everet giving the play a run, on film of course, and you’ll likely be familiar with the general storyline: a land-owning Brit in Hertfordshire leading a double life as both responsible-guardian-Jack and debauchery-hunting-Earnest.  Full of perfectly British names (and their corresponding stereotypes), Earnest is fun, quick-moving, and full of mishaps that force Jack, er Earnest, to come clean.

After the enormous, while short-lived, success of The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde never wrote another play – perhaps because he was imprisoned for being thought a homosexual.  As many authority figures have doubtlessly learned, though, genius, like Mr. Wilde’s, can’t be quelled by a little jail time.  Nor should your getting to see such wit in action be stymied by a little thing like tickets!  Readers, you have found yourself amidst yet another of our Extra! Extra! ticket giveaways.

The performance of The Importance of Being Earnest comes as part of the “Wicked Wilde Shakespeare Festival” running through June 27 at the Miles Memorial Playhouse in Santa Monica and we’ve got tickets to Thursday evening’s performance!  (That’s Thursday, June 10 at 8pm for the people in the back.)

Here’s the drill: we need your first name, last name, and email address and – voila – you’ll be hopping across the pond for a taste of British wit courtesy of the ever important Oscar Wilde.

(Click here if tickets are nothing to be trifled with and you’d prefer to purchase some.)

Clearly, the World Cup is a tad more significant than a movie opening, but both are representative of a larger global shift: the emergence of South Africa as an international cultural force—especially when it comes to cinema. From the success of a great film like District 9, to the obligatory Hollywood initiation of a Clint Eastwood-helmed drama (Invictus), it’s clear that the South Africa is tossing its hat in with the Western-dominated entertainment industry.

Is it any wonder, then, that their films are reflective of this cultural transcendence? District 9, for example, is not a provincial movie; it’s in direct conversation with the great alien invasions of Hollywood, from Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds to Independence Day. It pays its homage to tradition, while using the alien genre for its own purposes at the same time. And this is not simply a Tarantino-esque play of mash-ups; it’s a way to communicate.

Ralph Ziman’s Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema, which I got a chance to see this Friday at the USC Albert and Dana Broccoli Theatre, is no different (except maybe in budget and heaviness of hand, which I’ll get to later). Based loosely on a true story, it’s about the rise of slumlord Lucky Kunene, who starts off stealing cars in the small South African village of Soweto, but eventually moves to Johannesburg, where he enacts a brilliant plan to take over a series of high-rise buildings in the ghetto of the city, providing a deadly though lucrative buffer between the properties’ white landlords and black tenants. Along the way, he develops a relationship with a white woman from the suburbs, picks a fight with a drug kingpin, and becomes a kind-of slumlord Robin Hood.

The film’s South-meets-West dialectic is evident even in the title. When it was released in South Africa two years ago, it was just called Jerusalema, a reference to a well-known regional hymnal. The producers of the movie, however, felt the title needed an extra kick to be able to sell in America. So they added the preamble of “Gangster’s Paradise,” an obvious allusion to the 1995 Coolio song (though in actuality, may refer to the change in the Johannesburg motor license plate prefix post-Apartheid to “GP,” which stands for Gaunteng Province). Director Ralph Ziman, in a Q&A session after the screening, said he was okay with the change in title if it meant more people would see the film. And to my eye, this same cultural compromise was central to his entire cinematic creation.

Narrative-wise, for instance, the movie was yet another re-telling of the all-to-familiar gangster story—the rise and fall of a sympathetic crime boss. But the details of this particular tale are entirely fresh. The character of Kunene is someone you want to get to know better and better (especially in the hands of the actors Jafta Mamabolo and Rapulana Seiphemo, who respectively play the young and old versions of him), and the politics of how he takes over the high-rises are fascinating. Visually, too, it was photogrpahed in the overused documentary style made popular with films like City of God, and even District 9. Yet the gritty realism of the setting (they shot in one of the world’s most dangerous slums) was undeniable. And musically, the composer (who was present at the screening) certainly borrowed from the rhythm-heavy soundtracks of modern-day thrillers, while still seamlessly inserting never-before-heard, African chants and beats into the background of the mix.

According to actor Jafta Mamabolo—also present at the screening and Q&A— these cultural interweavings in Jerusalema have helped it to become a genuine, South African cult hit. Whether or not this proves to be true for American audiences, however, is another issue. Because while such narrative and aethetic borrowings may help to bridge gap between worlds, there is such a thing as overdoing it. Cheesy voice-over dialogue like “In the beginning…,” unnecessary chase scenes, predictable book-ends, and romantic sub-plots within the movie often cross the border into cliché. And I found myself, after the highly informative Q&A, wishing Ziman had let go of some of these Hollywood trappings, and stuck more closely to the real events that inspired him in the first place.

Regardless, the film is most definitely worth seeing, if for no other reason than to witness yet another step in the maturation process of a fast-growing industry. If you see it on opening night though, just make sure to not to miss the first game of the World Cup: South Africa vs. Mexico. My bet’s on the underdog.

Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema opens in select theaters on June 11th. For more information, please visit www.gangstersparadisejerusalema.com.