Past Events
PULSE!
Streaming May 1 - May 2, 2021
We are more determined than ever to get dancers dancing despite current challenges. With a new focus, LA Dance Moves has invited 4 professional dancers to create with and invites original works of a local composer to expose his music to new audiences. In an online dance and musical experience, PULSE shares a fresh and exciting look as we tell our stories of hope and resilience. We are thrilled to have this performance series appear on balletproject.tv; an exciting and new platform built specifically for the ballet world.
The Performance
Welcome to LA Dance Moves
New Works, Spring 2021:
PULSE! In Two Movements
PULSE is an album created by Professor David Karagianis which combines improvisational abilities into the realm of electronic music. Originally composed to accompany university modern classes, LA Dance Moves interprets this music in its unique way.
Choreographed by Artistic Director Nancy Paradis, PULSE was created in a hybrid format of both virtual rehearsals, self-practice, and in-studio rehearsals.
Can you Feel the Pulse?
Be ready to be inspired by choreography, music and behind the scenes footage in this
LA Dance Moves Experience!
About Composer David Karagianis
LA Dance Moves is thrilled to be collaborating with esteemed artist and composer
Professor David Karagianis.
David Karagianis is a composer, sound designer, pianist, electronic musician, and educator who divides his time between his homes in Los Angeles and Shelter Cove in Northern California’s Lost Coast. He serves as the Music Director of the Dance Program at Loyola Marymount University. David’s eclectic range and interests span film, dance, concert recital, theater and multi-media performance genres as well as classical, experimental, electronic, jazz, world, rock, pop and ambient stylistic boundaries.
Having served as Senior Musician for the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures (formerly the UCLA Department of Dance) for over 20 years and before that as Music Director of the Kinetikos Dance Foundation/Dance LA, David has collaborated in a variety of roles with several generations of Modern and Post-Modern dance makers. A recipient of a number of awards, grants and honors including a Lester Horton Award for Achievement in Sound: Music/Sound/Text, a winner in the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur Competition for Music Composition for Dance and a recipient of several Meet The Composer grants, over seventy of David’s scores for dance, concert, theater, video and multi-media have been performed or screened throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
David is a Founding Member and a former Vice President of the International Guild of Musicians in Dance. Albums of David’s music released on his Sound Dance® label currently available on iTunes and Amazon include Multiplex, PULSE (Laptop Dances 2.0) and Threshold. David is planning on releasing a new album featuring both chamber music and electronic music in 2021.
Story Behind the Music:
by David Karagianis
The stories behind Strut, Journey and the rest of Pulse – Laptop Dances are all pretty similar and encapsulated in the title. All of the pieces on this CD originated in modern dance classes I was accompanying. After I got my first laptop computer, a MacBook Pro, I realized that the capabilities of some of the high-end music software I was using had developed to the extent that I might begin to learn to harness them via extending my improvisational accompanying abilities into the realm of electronic music.
There was quite a bit of a learning curve particularly because I was rarely content improvising with anything less than 8 simultaneous loops so, quite frequently I’m told, people could see steam blowing out of my ears as a result of the amount of concentration it took to extemporaneously provide serviceable accompaniment while operating my sonic three dimensional game of chess. So practically everything on that CD began as something I started working up in a class as a solution towards solving a problem presented by a particular tempo, meter and movement character.
Information regarding David’s past and current projects as well recordings and scores are available on his website,