We love great tips here at Gia On The Move. And we love passing them on, even if they are last minute.
For some of you it’ll be a bit chilly still to hit the beach. But we highly advise that you not pass up the opportunity to barbecue with family & friends or get away to a bed & breakfast with your special someone this holiday weekend. And for the rest of the summer you’ll want some totally rocket essentials like the ones below.
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Snuggles welcome. Make them deliciously soft, comfy and delightfully fragrant.
Perfect for lazy days of reading, walks on the beach and bubble baths.
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Mangia Bella!
You’re ready to eat, meet and greet. Summer style at the BBQ always makes for chipper conversation and quite possibly more than a look and a smile from that cute boy you’ve been eyeing.
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It’s All The Waves!
You’re rockin’ your new highlights and are determined to show off months of hard core training and healthy habits. Whether you’re a Splendor in the Grass, or a Beach Blanket Bingo kind of gal, Summer casual will be your Summer love!
Check out all the latest from some of our regularly highlighted brands (just cause we love them!) from:
Mix, Mingle, and Ignite Entrepreneurship for women While Supporting A Good Cause
Tweet it! Hashtag:#WEConnect13
Up and coming professionals throughout Los Angeles will gather for one night of celebrating and supporting women entrepreneurship in the heart of the city. Held at the hub of startups, ROC Santa Monica, WE Connect will combine networking, boutique shopping and beauty and massage stations while benefiting the charitable programs of
A unique non-profit organization, Women Empowered has been inspiring women throughout greater Los Angeles since 2008. Expand your networks with like-minded individuals who are dedicated to women’s development, personal growth and the strength of formidable connections. Support women entrepreneurship by visiting our exhibitor lounge – filled with local women business owners with established products and services. 10% of all the evening’s proceeds will go back to Women Empowered.
Be inspired by renowned keynote speaker, Reba Merrill , Celebrity Journalist, Author & Entrepreneur. Having interviewed hundreds of Hollywood’s hottest stars from Whitney Houston , to Tom Cruise , to Cher, Reba will share her story of making a name for herself in a male dominated industry in an untouchable career that spanned decades.
Music provided by the ”silky” blends of female DJ, Dyla, who will spin her magic throughout the evening. Another shining star in a male driven industry, this rising female DJ, remixer, and producer delivers with some of the hottest electronic dance music on the scene. The first 60 guests will receive a fabulous VIP Swag Bag, and lucky raffle winner will receive a free Kindle Fire. Enjoy cocktails and delicious tapas in a trendy atmosphere while supporting a good cause.
When: Thursday, May 23rd Time: 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm Where: ROC Santa Monica, 604 Arizona, Santa Monica, CA Guests: Professional women and men throughout Greater Los Angeles
Women Empowered is excited to partner with LA professionals who share adesire for empowerment in an innovative setting. Tickets and more information are available by clicking the tickets link.
Sponsors include: Microsoft, resource Natural Spring Water, O.P.I, Pure Barre, Ms. Magazine, OM Organic Mixology, Rosenthal – The Malibu Estate, LaLicious, Yummy Dutchy, Nail Garden , Pretzel Crisps, Savour This Moment, Shades of Color African American Gifts and Hana Clegg Photography.
About Women Empowered: Women Empowered is an organization that connects, educates and supports women of all ages and backgrounds, and inspires them to give back to their communities through mentorship, networking and volunteerism.
The Whitney is fast approaching the opening of its new building in 2015.
After two years ago, of thoughtful internal dialogue by dedicated Museum staff regarding the Whitney’s graphic identity they asked design studio Experimental Jetset to develop a new approach which embraces the spirit of the Museum while serving as a visual ambassador for the new building. The result is a distinctive, dynamic and inventive graphic identity which the designers refer to as the “responsive ‘W’, that literally responds to art. It is a fundamental attribute of the Whitney since its founding in 1930 that also illustrates the Whitney’s ever-changing nature.
ABT is sadly loosing another great star: Irina Dvorovenko. Here is a dancer who is still so artistically superior to most dancers in every category, in her looks, art and intelligence, that it’s a big disappointment to see her pack her bags. The stars we are used to seeing at ABT are shrinking faster than the polar ice caps. Annashevilli, Carreno, Stiefel, Osipova, to name of few recently, and now Dvorovenko. And while some dancers depart in a natural progression, others seem premature. What gives?
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But before making her final boisterous curtain calls, Dvorovenko made a lasting impression not soon to be forgotten. Playing Tatiana, the naive and romantic heroine from Pushkin’s famous and beloved narrative poem, we see her express a deep and astonishing range of emotions, progressing from provincial love struck ingenue, to sophisticated and transformed socialite living in St. Petersburg many years later.
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Onegin, brooding, cold, and arrogant, must visit the country to inherit the property of a relative who has died. There he encounters the characters pivotal to his future existence. Lensky and Olga, lovers to be married become his friends, as well as Tatiana, a young beautiful, but bookish girl who sees Onegin’s imperial and remote bearing, and is shaken to her heart’s core with love and desire; she struggles as to whether she should reveal her own true feelings. Being smitten, she dreams of him. In a erotic and passionate pas de deux, Onegin’s image appears in her bedroom mirror, then emerges magically in the flesh to dance with her.
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Embracing, both Stearns and Dvorovenko create flames in their wild, open and ecstatic dance with Dvorovenko’s longing fluidity, her graceful, exquisite, and effortless nuance. Stearns, rapier slim, and elegant in black, partners her with delicacy and care, and is unwavering in his lift, carries and caresses. Later, as Tatiana slowly awakens to reality, she bravely opens herself to complete her love letter to Onegin.
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Those in attendance at the Met knew it was a memorable moment…
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Gemma Bond and Blaine Hoven were perfect as Lensky and Olga. Both danced with ardour and connection– totally believable characters that were both charming and clean in their movements; deeply in love, full of hope and joyful expectation, depicted in their splendid pas de deux in Act 1.
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At Tatiana’s name-day party, the guests dance a Czardas, and waltz in celebration. Olga and Lensky join in. Onegin catches Tatiana alone in the gazebo, and as she quietly awaits his response to her love letter, he archly and coldly detached, hands her back the letter, leaving her stunned, and then casually returns to the party unmoved. There he arrogantly grabs Olga and dances wildly with her. Olga too submits to Onegin’s charm and energy and forgets herself while Lensky watches As his jealousy mounts, Lensky confronts Olga for her behavior, but is rebuffed. Onegin unconcerned, continues to waltz with her deliriously as she submits to his lead. Afterwards, Lensky’s honor wounded, challenges his friend to a duel at sunrise.
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With moaning birches stuck onto a gray, forlorn landscape, the duel tragically ensues. Friend against friend, wounded lover defending his own fragile honor and that of his lover; pride, jealousy and spite all mixed in. Onegin senses the futility of such a duel and tries to end it, but Lensky will have nothing of it. In a single shot, Onegin kills Lensky. All collapse in bitterness.
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Years later in St Petersburg, Onegin returns a broken man, his whereabouts unknown. He appears at an elegant ball, royal and aristocratic, given by a distant relative, Prince Gremin (Vitali Krauchenka). Onegin dances with many women, all in a psychological, metaphorical dream, and ends at a table alone and disgusted. A woman dressed resplendently in red dances with the Prince. Here, Mr Krauchenka dances a beautiful pas de deux with his new bride, none other that Tatiana, and displays a tenderness and care that is fitting in their exquisite pas de deux; Dvorovenko rare, fine and astonishingly moving; the Tchaikovsky music filling the depth of the moment. When Onegin realizes the woman is Tatiana he understands his mistake from the past, and is compelled to write a love letter to her, and express his true nature. But it is much too late! As she reluctantly meets him alone, and he pleads for her on his knees, she realizes too she still loves him, has never forgotten him, but could never open her heart to him again. In an act of courage and defiance, she takes his letter, rips it to pieces, and hands it back to him.
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They say that in Russia there is a statue of Pushkin in every town and city, that he is their most esteemed writer. It is also worth noting that English writer Jane Austen also wrote a book that had similar themes in Pride and Prejudice. That in love, these themes of pride and prejudice, as in aristocratic Onegin and provincial Titania play out constantly in art, literature, opera, drama, and popular culture. Class structure impedes and confuses choices of the heart, and as Pushkin seems to be saying through Tatiana, its not a good idea to block your own true natures. This evening the dancers surely didn’t, and it was a tremendous gift Dvorovenko and company offered on her send off. Those in attendance at the Met knew it was a memorable moment, and responded with repeated curtain calls to a stage filled with cast and fellow dancers, and mountains of flowers, and lastly Dvorovenko’s little girl, dressed in what else, red.
RG Dance Projects is a newish modern dance company with impressive dancers, headed up by choreographer Ruben Graciani, himself a dancer who performed with Mark Morris from 1994 through 1999.
Friday night, Graciani’s group of dancers presented to a sold-out house, three bold dances. The most impressive piece was the final offering of the evening, We Fall Down, We Get Up. Backed by twelve men and twelve women in a vocal chorus, Emily Craver, Jacob Goodhart, Stephen James, Emily Pacilio, and Leslie St. Jour gave an all-out passionate and focused performance of final redemption and salvation.
“This work is an exploration on one’s boundaries; both those we create for ourselves and those we inherit.”
The dance begins with the dancers rolling, tumbling, crawling onto the stage in a simulated desert landscape. The singers are delivering a wall of celestial, religious chanting that underscores sympathy and salvation for the burden of the human condition. All is heavy and weighty for the dancers–they stumble and help each other. A red ribbon is strung across the stage in various ways symbolizing prisons and barriers that confine the dancers. Images of squalor, dust bowl-suffering, depression era poverty in the Deep South is echoed in another country bluesy tune–Everything I Got I Done and Pawned. The dancers get up and fall down, struggle and wilt to the floor– sometimes a bit too long and bit too much. The chorus re-enters with spiritual fervor.
This continues in duets between man and women, man versus man, until in a resolution of wild and harmonious freedom, Indian tabla drumming and sitar strings release the group from their oppression, and ecstatic moments of flying, represented when Emily Pacilio, climbing upon crouched bodies hurtles through the air with confident liberation, is caught, and repeats the move three times; it increasingly becomes a powerful moment of triumph. Ms Pacilio danced with passion and committed energy here, as well as in Swing and Miss.
“This work is an exploration on one’s boundaries; both those we create for ourselves and those we inherit. I am thinking about how much control we have over the expression of our identity, if some of identifying markers are more or less inherited and permanent.” Graciani.
All the dancers gave their utmost with great energy and conviction. Art isn’t easy–getting an idea conceptualized in movement as metaphor requires the luck and inspiration of a great poet. There are so many gestures, leaps, twists, turns, and falls symbolizing an idea, that putting it together in a dance is truly difficult. Seeing a piece only once is a challenge, since pieces grow in color and depth as you closely observe. Rapture, the second dance of the evening wasn’t as successful. The elements were there, the back projection of emotive images, water, clouds, lovers on a wharf, but the choreography didn’t convey the intense message the title suggests. In the Westbeth space, your vision was drawn more to the images on the wall than to the dancers on stage; the dancers became obliterated. Also, the choreography had the dancers strangely chaste, while those on screen were engaged.
Swing and a Miss spoke of the vagaries of love. In a speedy piece, the choreography was in a classical modern dance mode that had clean and precise lines with first, four dancers in a group, pairings of each man and woman, and lastly, a piece for two women. Wary approach, wary avoidance. Another peek, another retreat. Love is dangerous, love has pitfalls. The costumes were fun in fiery red and yellow unitards that conveyed robustness, ready and reporting for battle.
I woke up this morning wanting so desperately to find some inspiration in the day for myself…and then a video appeared in my box, posted by Ellison Ballet in NYC who The Model Critic covered in review. I had to share…
Featured here is 3rd Place Winner in the Classical Dance category, Yui Sugawara, age 19, who danced her piece called, “Exit,” at the 2013 Youth America Grand Prix which took place in Hartford, CT.
For their latest pop-up art installation this Saturday, May 18, 2013 from 7-10 pm, ShoeboxLA will present Cathy Weiss: I, Remember…
Mounted as a multi-media installation Weiss touches on memory and words, light and shadow, spirituality and physicality and the remembrance of her father.
Cathy Weiss earned her BFA from the University of California, Santa Cruz and completed the Graduate Program in Printmaking, Pratt Institute, New York (Printmaking Fellowship.)
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Check out this exhibition at:
The Southwest corner of Los Feliz Blvd. & Commonwealth Ave.
Los Feliz – Los Angeles, CA 90027
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Now in their second season…Started in September, 2011 by artists Sophia Allison and Paul W. Evans, ShoeboxLA gives Los Angeles artists an opportunity to do one-day, site-specific exhibitions outside the traditional gallery setting. Locations change for each show but the space remains the same. Blink and you’ll miss us…
We love great tips here at Gia On The Move. And we love passing them on, even if they are last minute.
