Union Station Doubles as a Stage for LADP's 2025 Gala

The dance company welcomed guests to the train depot’s Mission Moderne ticketing concourse for an evening of performances

Words by ELIZABETH VARNELL
Photography courtesy of BFA.com

LADP's gala at Union Station — Benjamin Millepied.

“You make the work, and then generations later it’s a way for us to tell the story of this moment in time,” said Benjamin Millepied, cofounder of L.A. Dance Project, as guests assembled inside Union Station’s ticketing concourse for the organization’s annual gala sponsored by Van Cleef & Arpels on Sunday, October 19. For Millepied, a dance reflects the era in which it’s created and serves as a unique cultural marker of that period. He’s been making such works for the company he cofounded over the past 12 years. The gala, set inside the West Coast’s largest passenger rail terminal, gave him a chance to reflect on the initial inspiration he found across the city when he first arrived. “When I moved to L.A., one of the first projects I did was an opera, in this station,” he said, describing the site-specific 2013 production of Invisible Cities, based on Italo Calvino’s novel with music by Christopher Cerrone that unfolded throughout Union Station with the audience wearing wireless headphones evoking a silent disco. “Every place you walk through has a story, a symbolic story. You can use the city as your playground,” he said. And he has, setting dances in the underbelly of Walt Disney Concert Hall, beside paintings hanging in the galleries of MOCA Grand, the outdoor patio at The Wallis.

Millepied and the dance company gathered supporters and honorary chair Adrien Frier, consul general of France in Los Angeles, for cocktails and performances in the station’s Fred Harvey restaurant and bar designed in Spanish Revival style by architect Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter. The prelude program, Le Rendez-Vous, concluded with Immded Immgewd, a piece centered around a drum kit, choreographed and performed by Jobel Medina and Elliott Sellers. The gala dinner, with a menu by chef Curtis Stone and held in the cavernous main ticketing concourse, included excerpts of Millepied’s On the Other Side and Hearts & Arrows as well as In Her Name choreographed and performed by Mythili Prakash. The evening benefitted the company’s Launch: LA residency program supporting emerging dance makers, and the organization’s Summer Dance Intensive held in partnership with Everybody Dance LA! Frier joked that he thought, when summoned to a train station, he would get to travel to Bakersfield or San Diego. “And yet we stay here,” he said, noting he had been metaphorically transported by dance.