Photo by Rachel Bruno

Maya Gingery performs the dance she created for "HomeLA" in and around the ledge of an empty swimming pool on the property owned by Chloë Flores and Tim Lefevre.

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At first glance, the scene in the terraced backyard with striking views of Los Angeles resembled any other casual house party at dusk. People in comfortable clothes milled around a deck, engaged in chit chat, ate oranges from a large tray perched on a ledge and took advantage of a nearby bottle of Tanqueray. It didn't take long, however, to notice that some of the house guests standing on the hillside below the deck seemed to be admiring the view with extra-special intensity. They stood completely still while several dancers, performing slow and liquid movements with their arms and torsos, moved deliberately in the zone of their peripheral vision.

The hillside happening, called "Peripheral Son" and created by choreographer Nick Duran, took place among 18 other site-specific performances at the inaugural event of "HomeLA." Some 180 people showed up last Saturday night to usher in the new grassroots dance series dedicated to the creation of art in private residences. They paid a $10 donation fee to roam the Mount Washington property of Chloë Flores and Tim Lefevre, owners of a stunning 3800-square-foot modernist home with a separate guesthouse that stands on nearly an acre of land.

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Gene Schiavone

Eifman Ballet in Rodin

This week's dance events include the return of Dance Camera West dance film festival and Eifman Ballet's sensual bio-ballet Rodin.

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5. A moving and movable Dance Film Fest
L.A.'s internationally recognized festival of dance on film, Dance Camera West, begins with this year's events moving among downtown's Music Center, West L.A.'s Getty Center, Santa Monica's Annenberg Beach House and mid-Wilshire's L.A. County Museum of Art. This year's theme Get Wet is carried out with a live performance involving a water feature at most venues prior to the screening of festival films. Parties on the opening and closing days as well as the screenings offer multiple chances to chat with the filmmakers. For a complete listing of events and venues go to www.dancecamerawest.org. At the Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., dwntwn.; Thurs., May 2, 7 p.m.; $15; Reception at 9 p.m., $20; Also at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 5905 Wilshire Blvd., mid-Wilshire; Fri., May 3, 3 p.m., 5 p.m.; 7:30 p.m., $15. 323-857-6000, www.lacma.org. Also at The Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, W.L.A.; Sat., May 4, 4 p.m., free. 310-440-7330, www.getty.edu/museum/. Also at Annenberg Community Beach House, 415 Pacific Coast, Santa Monica; Sun., May 5, 5 p.m., $20 afternoon, panel discussion free with reservation. 310-458-4904, www.annenbergbeachhouse.com. For a complete listing of events, venues & tickets go to www.dancecamerawest.org.

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Eva Recinos

The Service Station at Riverside lets you enjoy the weather while watching a movie this summer.

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Summer means you'll probably spend quite the number of evenings plopped on the couch or in a multiplex watching a movie. But this is L.A. and if you don't take advantage of the weather, especially during the summer, you're missing out.

That's what prompted a group of four who recently took over a 1960s gas station in Los Feliz and turned it into the Service Station at Riverside to organize an outdoor movie series starting tomorrow night, April 27. The Service Station at Riverside takes its name from a restored sign -- now able to shine in glowing neon -- sitting atop an awning giving shade to benches outside. You could easily miss the space on Riverside Drive if not for this sign and the distinctly retro feeling of the outdoor space.

The locale once held traditional drive-ins with a giant screen but before being remodeled stood as a scrapyard. But business partners Evan Roosevelt, Austen Lee, David Skinner, Clay Tatum, Phil Crowe and Rachelle House took over, so the space now serves as a veritable ground for creative happenings.

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Anna Jones

Performers Moira MacDonald, Whitney Rodriguez, Stephen Schilling and Mark Simon and musician Kari Rae Seekins rehearse a scene from "Exhibit A" onstage at Automata in Chinatown.

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Let's face it, puppets are cool. Automata, the non-profit experimental puppet theater and workshop that is quickly gaining a reputation as the center of cutting edge puppetry in Los Angeles, is yet again proving just how cool puppets can be with their latest production, Exhibit A, which opens today, for a two-weekend run. But the puppets you'll find at Automata aren't your average goofy, fuzzy, kid-stuff. L.A. Weekly sat in on a tech rehearsal this weekend and got a sneak peek.

In the show, a cast of life-size strangely beautiful puppets and live actors all play a number of different characters, mixing and melding personas in a dance both graceful and jarring. But the show goes beyond just entertainment value. Susan Simpson, the director of Exhibit A and co-founder of Automata, has a sophisticated vision of what this show can accomplish in the local arts community, both educationally and politically.

Exhibit A focuses mainly on the inner lives of some key members of the Mattachine Society, one of the very first homosexual activism groups in the United States when it was founded in L.A. in 1950. By the 1960s, the organization had chapters in cities all over the U.S.

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Making ideals reality can take a frustratingly long time, especially for organizations in need of funding. Grant-writing and paperwork often come first, followed by waiting. That's part of what's exciting about My LA2050, the $1 million challenge that the Goldhirsh Foundation, a philanthropic outfit with a young, energetic vibe, launched last month. It's fast.

Organizations had until March 28 to submit their "dream of the most innovative...ways to tackle" L.A. problems. These dreams, which had to be feasible, could belong to one of eight "indicators": arts & cultural vitality, education, environmental quality, health, housing, income & employment, public safety and social connectedness.

By April 2, all of the legit proposals were live on the My LA2050 website and public voting continues through noon on Wed., April 17. The organization with the most votes in each indicator will receive $100,000, all of which must be spent by December of this year. The foundation will also choose two additional projects to grant $100,000. The money comes from the Goldhirsh's endowment and the idea for the challenge resulted from the LA2050 report the foundation commissioned last year, which found, among other things, that L.A. had more arts organizations per capita than other major cities, but less funding.

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Courtesy Night Gallery

"Made in Space" at Night Gallery

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This week, the painter who pushed for a "superflat" aesthetic brings his formerly 2-D monsters to the big screen, three artists clean an alt space from floor to ceiling, and a group show makes Night Gallery's big new space feel maze-like in a good way.

5. Mr. Clean as a conceptualist
Starting the morning of April 5, Human Resources, the vintage Chinatown theater-turned-art space, will be cleaned. The designated cleaners, who will use designated cleaning supplies (the press release mentions Mr. Clean), include Hailey Loman, whose wearable sculpture includes a blanket with a plastic sleeping compartment in the middle of it. Sleeping "wearers" of this sculpture look shrink-wrapped, safe in a sterile way. Cleaners also include Gaea Woods, who photographs objects of beauty, and Lucy Campana, who appeared in Opening Ceremony's ethereally clean "Spa Heaven" videos. Cleaning has been an art act before, but often to bring attention to labor hierarchies or gender roles. This time, the primary subject is the elusiveness of being perfectly clean. You can come to watch or help. 410 Cottage Home St.; Sat., April 5-7, starting 11 a.m.; free. (213) 290-4752; humanresourcesla.com.

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YouTube/HarajukuMonae

A performance at Burn Club

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The L.A. fire artist known as Tedward saw police lights flashing out of the corner of his eye just before filling his mouth with fuel. Police cruise Culver City Park after dark sometimes and flash their lights to make their presence known, so he didn't think much of it. But then he heard voices warning him not to move. He turned to see two cops with guns drawn — rookies whose superiors had neglected to tell them to expect fire on the park's basketball courts.

Tedward had a full mouth, fuel in one hand and a torch in the other. He couldn't speak, so he stood staring for a drawn-out moment. Bystanders tried to explain, but the cops didn't understand. So Tedward made an executive decision: He turned around and breathed out a rush of flames.

"Do it again!" one rookie exclaimed.

When Tedward tells this story, he's quick to point out it happened a long time ago and that it's not indicative of a strained relationship between Burn Club, the group he started in 2004 for fire practice, and Culver City law enforcement. They're on good terms, actually, and Tedward meets with L.A. fire marshals routinely.

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Photo by Gabrielle Canon

Comedy Living Room hosts Matt Lottman and Frank Chad Muniz

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It all started with a red curtain. Roommates Matt Lottman and Frank Chad Muniz realized that the front of their Hollywood rental house resembled a stage one morning when Muniz stood in front of their red-draped front window.

"Basically the ball started rolling in our heads," Lottman says, sitting on a couch in their living room. "We thought, 'Hey, we don't get to go to open mics because of our work hours and whatnot, but why don't we bring the open mic to us.' "

Lottman and Muniz created a monthly show, aptly named Comedy Living Room, that is part Pee-wee's Playhouse, part Saturday Night Live and part stand-up comedy, with a house-party vibe.

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Jos McKain

Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal with hunky bartenders / canvases for artist Alex Chavez, Dave McCreary and Zak Stone at CLOSE at Concord Art Space.

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Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal believes art should be about having fun. But when it comes to her belief that words have the power to connect people, she is not messing around.

CLOSE, her event last Friday at Concord Art Space (one of our 25 Alternative L.A. Art Spaces to Check Out Now) was part book release, part gallery installation, part performance art and part plain good old-fashioned party.

Featuring works by Brandon Andrew, Daniel M. Savage, Alex Chavez, Jesse Malmed and James Roehl, the show did in fact feature a fully-functional The Princess and the Frog bouncy castle, an unconventional clown creating adult-themed ballon sculptures (I was lucky enough to get an orange vulva) and some strapping, half-naked bartenders, as well as an additional gallery with several engaging multi-media pieces for visitors to experiment and play with.

More and more, the art scene is morphing to include fleeting, interactive works. Following in the footsteps of pioneers from the 1960s and 70s such as John Baldessari, Marina Ambramovic and Michael Asher, many emerging contemporary artists are now focusing part or all of their practice on gaining active participation from their audiences. Mainstream galleries and museums are becoming increasingly open to this kind of work, which is called relational aesthetics.

Rosenthal, although petite, is a powerhouse when performing live. A graduate of Vassar and the CalArts writing MFA program, her poems were recently featured in PANK magazine. At the CLOSE event I met up with her to discuss the finer points of this expanding vision of experienced-based art centered in the growing number of artist-run and alternative spaces in and around L.A., and to try and figure out what exactly this all has to do with adults jumping around in bouncy castles...

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Carol Cheh

Just a few of the assholes of Los Angeles

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Forget the Fuck Yeah Fest -- on Sunday Los Angeles had its own Assholes Festival, courtesy of the artist collective Llano del Rio.

Held on the street corner outside of the Chinatown nonprofit art space Human Resources, the event was a celebratory launch for their new zine publication, An Antagonist's Guide to the Assholes of Los Angeles. The guide provides a crowd-sourced listing of numerous targets of anger and/or protest in the city, such as the 10 freeway, the weapons manufacturer Raytheon Company, ARCO gasoline, Eli Broad, LAX, the Venice Whole Foods and "that fucking whore who cut me off at the Robertson exit," among many others.

A funny and provocative pamphlet that acts as a sort of tool for creative social agitation, Assholes also features substantive essays, ranging from Lisa Anne Auerbach's humorous account of her day-to-day encounters with assholes around the city to Jennifer Flores Sternad's consideration of historic works of street-oriented performance art by artists of color and Marisa Jahn's dialogue on the meaning of the term "agonism" (defined by theorist Michel Foucault as "a relationship built on mutual incitement and struggle").

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