REDCAT: A co-production of Pick Up Performance Co(S.) and The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at CalArts

Los Angeles dance and theater audiences have the extraordinary opportunity to discover an American masterpiece as David Gordon’s Trying Times returns to stages for the first time since 1982, when it was originally commissioned by New York’s Dance Theater Workshop.

Gordon has been an offbeat, original and persistently unpredictable choreographer, director and writer for more than 40 years, from his early work as one of the founding artists of the seminal Judson Dance Theater to an eclectic spectrum of commissions for DTW, American Ballet Theater, WNET’s Dance in America and the Mark Taper, among many others. The landmark Trying Times is his purposefully “anti-signature” piece, linking a range of movement, visual devices and dialogue to weave a course between droll off-handedness and precisely calibrated design.

Mischievously set to the complete score of Igor Stravinsky’s Apollo, the ballet that became one of George Balanchine’s signature works, Trying Times unfolds as a sly recasting of postmodernism, asking questions of both Gordon’s own pioneering use of “talking dance” and downtown art’s dogged refusal of classical forms.

The performances at REDCAT feature five of Gordon’s PUPC(S) members including Karen Graham, original cast member Valda Setterfield -- Gordon’s longtime muse -- and eight CalArts dance students. Trying Times performances at REDCAT are immediately followed by a two-week run at DTW in New York.

See: http://redcat.org/season/0809/dan/times.php ($)