The venerated Los Angeles-based Lula Washington Dance Theatre returns to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts to celebrate its milestone 40th anniversary with a dynamic and powerful program exploring social and humanitarian issues. The company performs for three nights only, from Thursday, January 30 through Saturday February 1, 2020, 7:30 pm, in The Wallis’ Bram Goldsmith Theater. The program, which launches the company’s year-long anniversary celebration and includes three world premieres and a West Coast premiere, is decidedly forward-looking, with new works from new voices, some of whom are a generation younger than co-founders Lula and Erwin Washington. Mixing jazz, hip-hop, African movement, ballet, modern, tap and other dance styles, the company has built an international reputation for the vitality, energy and depth of its repertory and the charisma and interpretive power it brings to each and every performance. Hailed as a major “taste-makers in the dance world” (NPR) and “an expresser of inner-city culture” (Reno-Gazette Journal), the company uses “the art of dance to make a deep impact” (Anchorage Press). A talk-back with members of the company immediately follows the performance on January 30, and a champagne toast follows the performance on January 31.
For this special event, the dance troupe presents the world premieres of To Lula with Love created for the occasion by celebrated choreographer Christopher Huggins, a former member of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and an alum of Lula Washington Dance Theatre, and Hands Up: A Testimony by company alumnus Tommie Waheed Evans, who received a 2019 Princess Grace Foundation Honorarium Grant to create the work, which focuses on his experience growing up in Los Angeles and what it meant to him to be a product of that city.
Additionally, the program features two works by company Founder/Artistic Director Lula Washington, including the world premiere of excerpts from Fragments, a work-in-progress she describes as “a reaction to the chaotic times we live in,” and King, which she created in 2007 about the struggles of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the civil rights movement. Other repertoire includes the West Coast premiere of Zayo, a bold, Afro-fusion, dance-theatre work about self-discovery, destiny and personal strength by Esie Mensah, who hails from Toronto, Canada and Ghana, and Reign, a joyous gospel-fueled work by hip-hop concert pioneer Rennie Harris commissioned by Lula Washington Dance Theatre in 2010 for its then 30th anniversary.