This evening of dance under a starry September sky was a fast-paced showcase of what Los Angeles does best: entertain and impress with lightening speed.

At times, the overload of stimuli was daunting – taking the music list from Bizet to Beethoven, Khachaturian and Bach to the Prokofiev. The Los Angeles based contemporary music ensemble Wild Up, under music director Christopher Rountree, whose dynamic and powerful conducting style often drew attention away from the multi-media spectacle on stage, provided some of the evening’s live accompaniment. The musicians, including Roundtree himself, started the night by slowly entering the beautiful outdoor amphitheater space from the back of the audience. As the sound of Kallmeyer’s "Bach as a Lens," trickled in, the audience immediately started to look around. Heads turned, people stood up to get a better view – it is almost as if audience members expected some sort of participatory element.

The program denoted a two-act structure, though each scene had its own title suggesting it was a separate entity. In the end, the evening indeed resembled more of a showcase of vignettes. In one section, dancers rushed franticly past one another, dressed in pin striped business suits. In the next, the poet and his muse indulged in a lyrical duet, which felt much like an extract from a romance novel or a daytime soap opera. Then, there was the ode to modern dance legend Alvin Ailey’s grounded and powerful style, a nod to Twyla Tharp’s "In the Upper Room’s" complicated stage patterns and rhythms, and then of course, there’s the music video routine and The Gap commercial feel-good piece. Ezralow’s performers made it through all, their stamina and stage presence shone. Most of them hail from the Broadway world, some of them, like Jamaican-born Anthea Young who trained at the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Kennedy Center program, come from a ballet background and Ezralow plays to each individual’s strengths.

As opposed to presenting a cohesive program, award-winning choreographer and UC Berkeley graduate Daniel Ezralow deliberately chose to present a recycling of previous works, which he explains in a pre-show interview with DancePlug.

"I never had the urge to have a home." Ezralow says, hinting at his eclectic body of work. He choreographed the Sochi Olympics opening ceremony, delved into modern dance, the commercial scene and ballet (He created for the Paris Opera Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago amongst others).

There is no doubt Ezralow is good at tailoring choreography to suit his dancers and the specifics of a commission such as the performance space for example. At the end of the evening when the sounds of Satie almost lulled the audience into a trance, construction workers enter and start taking the theatre apart with sledgehammers and other heavy equipment. This is the last performance to take place at the Ford Theater before closing for a year of remodeling.

There is also no doubt that Ezralow is endearingly entrenched in the past and present of dance and wholeheartedly invested in its future.

The question remains: where do the lines blur? Where does being inspired by someone and recycling ideas become imitation and repetition?

Reach Contributor Wiebke Schuster here.

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