dancer

MARRIED At First Sight UK is back with a bang and a whole host of soon-to-be newlyweds looking for love.

Here we get to know brand-new bride Julia-Ruth, who’s more familiar with the spotlight than most reality TV contestants.

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Who is Julia-Ruth from Married at First Sight UK 2025?

Julia-Ruth is a 29-year-old professional dancer, originally from South Africa, who currently calls New Zealand and the UK home.

She has performed with some massive artists, even working as a backup dancer for rap megastar 50 Cent.

Julia-Ruth is one of the contestants starring in Married At First Sight UK 2025.

She had a challenging childhood, including being adopted at the age of 16 by her sister.

Julia-Ruth has experience in reality TV, so this isn’t her first foray into reality romance.

In 2023, she appeared on the Paramount+ programme Are You The One?

Julia-Ruth found love on the show, but the relationship didn’t last.

She has now been single for two years and admits she’s had a bad habit of choosing the wrong men.

So for her next chapter, Julia-Ruth is turning to the experts on Married At First Sight UK.

She’s hoping to find a grounded, ambitious and empathetic partner.

When is Married At First Sight 2025 on?

The new series of Married At First Sight UK starts on Sunday, September 21, 2025.

It runs nightly at 9pm from Sundays through to Wednesdays for its first few weeks on E4.

In previous years, the show aired Mondays to Thursdays, meaning MAFS UK on the weekend is a special treat for viewers this time around.

Expert matchmakers Paul C Brunson, Mel Schilling and Charlene Douglas are returning to make matches and guide couples through the process.

Who are the other Married at First Sight UK 2025 contestants?

Brides

• Anita, 54, operations manager from Durham — following some turbulent times she’s ready to say yes to everything, including a man she’s never met
• Grace, 31, midwife from Norwich — funny Grace is looking for a tall, dark, handsome, confident and humorous partner
• Leah, 35, business owner from Liverpool — searching for a fun and spontaneous partner after coming to the realisation she prefers women aged 25
• Leigh, 30, NHS clinical coder from Romford — following heartbreak, she’s ready for her happily ever after
• Maeve, 29, aesthetics practitioner from Newcastle — ‘trouble maker’ mum who refuses to settle for a man who won’t put the effort in
• Nelly, 30, cosmetic dentist from Manchester — hoping to get everything she deserves after a year alone
• Rebecca, 32, aesthetics nurse and clinic owner from Liverpool — looking for her dream man following a broken engagement
• Sarah, 31, recruitment consultant from Aberdeen — thinking there aren’t any eligible bachelors in her hometown, she’s only after “the nicest guy in the world”

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Grooms

• Ashley, 35, operations director from Bridgend — Sporty father whose ex-girlfriends include a former Miss Universe
• Bailey, 36, sales manager from St Albans — dad who set up a microbrewery, looking for family-oriented partner
• Davide, 33, cabin crew from Portugal — looking for fellow romantic following heartbreak after his huge wedding was cancelled earlier this year
• Dean, 31, team-building host from Feltham — following a year on his own he’s hoping to find his soul mate
• Divarni, 29, musician from London — self-proclaimed ladies’ man looking for partner with a nice smile
• Joe, 31, personal trainer from Huddersfield — former lothario and world traveller who’s ready to settle down after a frank talk from his mum
• Keye, 33, marketing manager from London — hoping the experts will find a man to look after him following his previous marriage ending
• Paul, 60, retired — father of three looking for someone he can share his hobbies with
• Steven, 34, investment banking manager from Essex — dad of two, ready to find lasting love after a year single

STRICTLY Come Dancing could be embroiled in a new ‘fix’ row after Dani Dyer claimed she was a ‘qualified dancer’.

Dani Dyer was the second celebrity contestant confirmed for Strictly Come Dancing 2025, with the announcment being made on The One Show earlier this week.

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Dani, 29, shot to fame when she won Love Island in 2018 – with her new reality stint very different to the dating show.

The daughter of EastEnders actor Danny Dyer will waltz her way around the ballroom in September when she joins the cast of the hit series.

But now it has been revealed that in an unearthed passage from her autobiography, Dani boasted about being a “qualified dancer”.

She said in her 2019 book that she would put “qualified dancer” under the list of qualifications on her CV.

Writing in her book, which came out six years ago, Dani wrote about how she went to theatre school at weekends from the age of 2 to 14.

“It was called O’Farrell’s Stage School and I was a really good little dancer,” she said.

Dani added: “I’m not a bad singer but it was the dance stuff I loved more – jazz, tap, ballet, modern. I’d get home and prance around the house.”

Elsewhere in the book she writes up a mock CV where she states her qualifications include: “Qualified dancer and pretty good at singing (especially Dua Lipa or Ariana Grande at the top of her voice while cleaning the kitchen).”

‘I’D BE HAPPY TO BE WHISKED AROUND’

She also spoke about Strictly in her book, saying how she would jump at the chance of being asked to compete on the hit reality dancing competition.

“If Strictly Come Dancing want to give me a call I’d also be happy to be whisked around the dance floor,” she penned at the time.

At the time of her book coming out, Dani was all loved up with then-beau Jack Fincham, and she said of Strictly: “The only thing I’d be worried about would be the curse.”

In her book from several years ago, Dani also swooned about her bond with Shirley Ballas.

Bonding with her on a trek for Comic Relief, Dani said she was “just the most graceful, lovely person”.

But despite admitting her prior dance experience, fans are still excited to see Dani storm the ballroom.

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Reacting to the news of Dani being confirmed for the series, one person on X said: “Woooo I love Dani!!!”

“Whoop I love Dani! She’ll be awesome,” penned a second.

The Sun has contacted Strictly for comment but they did not immediately respond.

SHOWBIZ BACKGROUND SCRUTINY

Dani is not the only star in Strictly history to have had their background in the world of showbiz scrutinised.

Tasha Ghouri, also from Love Island, had her background in dance.

The star who appeared on the series last year faced a backlash for being a trained dancer and branded the show a “fix” because they signed her up.

Actress Sarah Hadland and JLS’ JB Gill were also accused of having advantages on the show because of their backgrounds and prior careers.

But despite all of their experience, nor Tasha, Sarah or JB won the show.

STRICTLY 2025 LINE UP SO FAR

Gladiator Nitro‘s signing for Strictly was shortly followed by the announcement of three more contestants – Love Island star Dani, Doctor Who actress Alex Kingston and former footballer Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink were then revealed.

EastEnders star Balvinder Sopal, who plays the role of Suki Panesar in the hit soap, was then confirmed on Tuesday morning.

With YouTuber George Clarke unveiled on Tuesday afternoon on BBC Radio 1.

Model Ellie Goldstein, who has Down syndrome, was then the seventh celebrity revealed to be waltzing their way onto the dance floor next month, in the groundbreaking signing.

RuPaul‘s Drag Race UK star La Voix was then the next confirmed star to be announced.

And former England rugby union player and captain Chris Robshaw has also been confirmed this week.

“Who can turn the world on with her smile?” It’s Mary Tyler Moore, of course, and you should know it.

To be precise, it’s Mary Richards, a person Moore played. But the smile was her own, and it worked magic across two situation comedies that described their time in a way that some might have regarded as ahead of their time. Although Moore proved herself as an actress of depth and range and peerless comic timing again and again, on the small and big screen and onstage, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” made her a star, and incidentally a cultural figurehead, and are the reason we have a splendid new documentary, “Being Mary Tyler Moore,” premiering Friday on HBO. Were it titled simply “Being Mary,” there’d be little doubt who was meant.

Moore was driven to perform from an early age, which she relates to wanting to impress her father — though that seems too simple. She trained as a dancer, and right out of high school played a pixie, Happy Hotpoint, in a series of appliance commercials. (A visible pregnancy ended that job.) She played a faceless switchboard operator on “Richard Diamond, Private Detective,” from which she was bounced when she asked for more money, and a typical assortment of starlet roles in television and movies. A failed audition to play the older daughter on “The Danny Thomas Show” led to her being called for “Van Dyke,” of which Thomas was an executive producer. Creator Carl Reiner remembers, “I read about 60 girls, and I read the whole script with them. She read three lines, three simple lines. There was such a ping in it, an excitement, a reality to it.” They soon discovered her gift for comedy.

“The Dick Van Dyke Show,” in which Moore played Laura Petrie to Van Dyke’s Rob, came into the world in the first year of the Kennedy administration, and there is something of that new White House, torch-passed-to-a-new-generation spirit in the Petries’ New Rochelle, N.Y., home. (Van Dyke was 35 when the show premiered — just old enough to be president himself — to Moore’s 24, but the two never seemed generationally distinct.) They were modern, with modern tastes. This was not the old-fashioned, small-town family comedy of “Father Knows Best” or “Leave It to Beaver.” If you lived in my household, you might have felt right at home with them.

Then again, “Dick Van Dyke” was not really a family comedy; some episodes might involve their son, Richie (Larry Mathews), but many more would not, and when child-rearing was the subject, it would more likely highlight the foolishness of the parents. The Petries were suburban in the sense of being connected to, not remote from, the city — sophisticated, fun, elegant. They threw parties, went out in formal wear, tried the latest dances. They were sexual. And they held the stage with equal strength and force.

If they were well on the safe side of bohemian, they were arty in their way, Rob a comedy writer, Laura, like Moore, a dancer — a former dancer in the show, which was not so ahead of its time to imagine a working mother. Still, the series found opportunities to let her dance. (“I will go to my grave thinking of myself as a failed dancer, not a successful actor,” Moore says in the documentary.)

Famously — and at once realistically and, for TV at that time, radically — she wore pants, tight ones; Moore is nearly synonymous with Capris. I turned on a random episode the other night (Season 4, Episode 1, “My Mother Can Beat Up My Father”), one I’d somehow never seen, in which a drunk at a restaurant bar begins to harass Laura. Rob tries to get him to back off, claiming he knows karate, and gets a punch in the nose — at which Laura, to her own surprise, flips the drunk with a judo move. (She’d learned self-defense when she was entertaining at Army bases.)

It winds up in a society column. Laura finds it funny. Rob, whose ego is as bruised as his proboscis, childishly lashes out.

Rob: “How come you never dress like a girl?”

Laura, incredulous: “What?

“Well, honey, I mean, shirts and slacks, shirts and slacks, that’s all I ever see when I come home.”

“You love me in shirts and slacks.”

“Yeah, well, but whatever happened to dresses?”

“Rob, you know, this is the stupidest conversation we’ve ever had.”

Mary Tyler Moore with Dr. Robert Levine, to whom she was married from 1983 until her death in 2017. Levine is an executive producer on “Being Mary Tyler Moore.”

(From Robert Levine / HBO)

“Dick Van Dyke” stories were divided equally between home and work, with the two worlds frequently intersecting. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” took that model and put Moore in the center of the action, amid a brilliant comic cast. Her move to Minneapolis, which begins the series and lands her in the newsroom at WJM, was not born from tragedy or pressure; she moves on her own initiative, recovering from nothing but the possibility of a life that won’t suit her.

That Mary was a single woman in no rush to be married was something new for television — but it could hardly be said that she lived alone; her apartment was subject to regular incursions from Rhoda (Valerie Harper) and Phyllis (Cloris Leachman), a company of women hashing out their different lives in a sort of dialectical comedy. (There were women in the writing room; Treva Silverman, whose comments are featured prominently in “Being Mary Tyler Moore,” was the first woman to win an Emmy with a solo credit.)

Whether this was or was not a feminist series is a question that still prompts think pieces. Gloria Steinem thought not, and Moore did not identify herself as such — though in the opening scene of the documentary, in a 1966 interview with a backward David Susskind, she does say, “I agree with Betty Friedan and her point of view in her book ‘Feminine Mystique’ that women are, or should be, human beings first, women second, wives and mothers third.”

Unlike the Norman Lear comedies — “All in the Family,” also on CBS, premiered a few months after “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — the MTM-produced comedies, which also included the “Moore” spinoffs “Rhoda” and “Phyllis,” were contemporary and “adult” without being issue-oriented. But because they were realistic about their characters, they couldn’t help but engage with their times and the culture. If the feminism of “Mary Tyler Moore,” which is in a sense just a function of its intelligence, is not explicit, it is in the bones of the show. And Mary, like the woman who played her, “inspired as many women as Eleanor Roosevelt,” in the words of series co-creator James L. Brooks.

If Moore never repeated the massive television success of her first two series, well, that would have been practically impossible. Some failed later shows, including the sitcom “Mary,” which found her working at a Chicago tabloid, and “The Mary Tyler Moore Hour,” which blended variety with a backstage sitcom, go unmentioned in the documentary, but are not without interest and may be found floating in cyberspace. Various dramatic roles, onscreen and onstage, demonstrated the subtlety and depth of her acting, though you could find that in most any episode of “Mary Tyler Moore” as well.

Her last great triumph — though not at all the end of her career — was her Oscar-nominated turn in Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People,” whose cold mother is deemed closer to her own character; she had a reputation, she says, for being “an ice princess.” Redford decided to cast her having once seen her walking on the beach, looking sad. (“He saw my dark side.”)

It is the point of nearly any show business biography that the person we know from their work is and is not the person who lived the life. Indeed, the very title “Being Mary Tyler Moore” suggests that “Mary Tyler Moore” was both a part she played and a person she was, similar in some respects and markedly different in others. Directed by James Adolphus, with Moore’s widower, Dr. Robert Levine, on board as an executive producer, the film has access to a wealth of family photos and home movies — including footage of her bridal shower, featuring a hilarious Betty White — and does a fine job of illuminating the private Moore, with testimony from (unseen) colleagues, friends and family.

It’s no secret that her life was marked by tragedy. (She was a private person, but she wrote books. And some things you can’t keep out of the papers.) She had a drinking problem. Her sister died from an overdose of alcohol and painkillers. Her son, Richard, accidentally shot himself. Diabetes led to numerous problems with her health. But “Being Mary Tyler Moore” is a happier story than one might expect, which in itself makes it a moving one. Moore and Levine were married from 1983 to her death in 2017, and they settled into a life filled with dogs and horses; there were good works too, on behalf of juvenile diabetes.

We can too easily measure the worth of a performer’s life by their professional success, as if there’s nothing more terrible than a canceled sitcom, a box office flop or the lack of good roles all but a few actors eventually face. “Being Mary Tyler Moore” reminds us not to make that mistake.

No pop artist today has a more tangled relationship to a venue than the Weeknd has with SoFi Stadium.

First, he chose SoCal’s flagship stadium as the site to film the denouement of his cult-campy HBO series “The Idol” during one of his concerts. Unfortunately, during the set, he lost his voice four songs in and had to send fans home for the night so he could recover and make up the date. For such a perfectionist, that must have been a body blow.

He rebounded a few months later with a triumphal return and the concert doc “The Weeknd: Live at SoFi Stadium.” But that nerve-racking experience stuck with him. He revisited it in his recent feature film (and album) “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” where a fictional version of the Weeknd loses his voice onstage, kicking off a surrealist, violent night with Jenna Ortega. A brief interlude from that LP is titled “I Can’t F— Sing.”

So Abel Tesfaye must have had a range of mixed feelings when he walked out at SoFi on Wednesday night, the first of four nights at the site of some of his greatest triumphs and most bitter disappointments as a live performer. “This is bigger than me — it’s a reflection of the power of music and its impact on people,” Tesfaye told The Times in a brief email just before the show.

The Weeknd performs during his After Hours til Dawn Stadium Tour at SoFi Stadium.

(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)

This slickly cryptic, immaculately performed 2½-hour set covered the whole of his era-defining catalog. But is this run of SoFi dates a swan song to one of the most successful recording projects of our time?

Since first emerging as an anonymous voice atop gothic, coked-up R&B productions on a trilogy of 2011 mixtapes, Tesfaye’s tastes and his unlikely commercial success grew together.

An underground fan base turned up for the nihilism of “Wicked Games” (“Bring the drugs, baby, I could bring my pain”). But with assists from Max Martin and Daft Punk, he became a bona fide pop star. His mournful Ethiopian melodic lilt stood out like nothing else in Top 40, and he hung onto enough art-freak sensibility that he could headline the Super Bowl halftime show with dancers in full-face plastic-surgery bandages. His ’80s-noir, 2019 single “Blinding Lights” remains the most-streamed song on Spotify, ever.

Darryl Eaton, his agent at CAA, told The Times that the 200,000 tickets sold for this SoFi run alone is “like selling out an entire American city.”

Yet Tesfaye has recently hinted at retiring the Weeknd as a premise. “It’s a headspace I’ve gotta get into that I just don’t have any more desire for,” he told Variety recently. “It never ends until you end it.”

Whether he wants to release less conceptual, more personal music, or if he’s simply run out of gas with this all-consuming pop entity he’s created, this SoFi run is likely one of the last chances L.A. fans will get to see the Weeknd. Tesfaye will surely keep making music and films, but it makes cinematic sense that he’d come back to the scene of his most painful night onstage to put this all to bed.

After a brief and typically roiling set from Tesfaye’s recent collaborator Playboi Carti, Tesfaye emerged in black and gold, eyes lit with LED pinpicks, over a ruined cityscape. Opening with the “BoJack Horseman”-riffing “The Abyss,” he grimly promised, “I tried my best to not let you go / I don’t like the view from halfway down … I tried to be something that I’ll never be.” It sure felt like he was saying goodbye to this way of being an artist.

The show kicked into gear with Tesfaye surrounded by a trim live band and minimalist, moving-sculpture dancers in rose-colored robes. He didn’t need much more to let that once-in-a-generation voice carry everything. Tesfaye’s a uniquely dedicated live vocalist on the stadium circuit (it’s kind of honorable that any serious vocal troubles might mean the show’s over). For all his high-concept misdirections in videos and films, you could feel the troubled intimacy that’s kept fans invested in this music over so many aesthetics.

For all his close reads of Michael Jackson’s records on singles like “Can’t Feel My Face,” Tesfaye’s not an especially physical dancer onstage. But he knows exactly how to inhabit and set-dress this music to make it eerie and monolithic, even at its poppiest.

The Weeknd.

(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)

“After Hours” made a seductive case for letting an obviously toxic man back into your life (“Different girls on the floor, distracting my thoughts of you”). After finally taking off his face mask, he played “Take My Breath” like a revving, neo-disco floor-filler that still winked at the darker choke-kinks of his old music.

When he cranked up the pyro on the midcareer lurker ballad “The Hills,” the front rows of SoFi got a bracing reminder of how volatile this music is even when it sits atop streaming charts. Alongside Carti on their collaborations “Timeless” and “Rather Lie,” Tesfaye grounded his pal’s smeary Atlanta noise with evilly pretty melody. This is a voice you just can’t help but believe, even when it’s calling you to self-destruction.

The Weeknd performs at SoFi Stadium.

(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)

If this tour is indeed at the end of his tenure as the Weeknd, at more than three dozen songs, Wednesday’s set delivered every possible angle of valediction — the thrumming decadence of “Often,” the desperate sincerity of “Die for You” and “Is There Someone Else?” Newer material like “Cry for Me” and “São Paolo” showed that, whatever his exhaustion with this aegis, he’s got tons of startling ideas still brimming.

When Tesfaye buried the hatchet with the Grammys back in February, it was a generous gesture to an organization that inexplicably locked him out of honors for “Blinding Lights,” which he should, obviously, have contended for. When he played that double-time, neo-New Wave single toward the end of his Wednesday set, it felt like a strange pearl that he’d discovered — one of the biggest pop songs of all time, played by a guy whose music emerged from a murk of MDMA licks and mournful threesomes.

With perhaps the exception of his (exceedingly stylish if critically skeptical) film career, he’s always found his voice, over and over again. SoFi Stadium has dealt the Weeknd his greatest defeat and some of his finest hours as a performer. Now it’s sending him off to Valhalla, wherever that takes Abel Tesfaye.

Los Angeles is neither a dance center nor a dance desert. We don’t have much of a history of nourishing major ballet companies. We do have a plethora of smaller companies — modern, classical and international.

You may have to look for it, but somewhere someone is always dancing hereabouts for you.

I sampled three very different dance programs last weekend at three distinctive venues in three disparate cities and for three kinds of audiences. The range was enormous but the connections, illuminating.

At the grand end of the scale, Miami City Ballet brought its recent production of “Swan Lake” to Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa — beginning a run of varied versions of Tchaikovsky’s beloved ballet this summer. It will be Boston Ballet’s turn at the Music Center this weekend. San Francisco Ballet gets in the act too, dancing excerpts at the Hollywood Bowl as part of this year’s Los Angeles Philharmonic “Tchaikovsky Spectacular.”

On a Television City soundstage in the Fairfax district, American Contemporary Ballet, a quintessential L.A. dance company that explores unusual sites around town, is presenting George Balanchine’s modernist classic “Serenade,” along with a new work by the company’s founder, choreographer Lincoln Jones. Meanwhile, on Saturday night, violinist Vijay Gupta and dancer Yamini Kalluri mingled Bach and Indian Kuchipudi dance tradition at the 99-seat Sierra Madre Playhouse.

Miami City Ballet has attracted attention for mounting what is being called a historically informed “Swan Lake” by the noted Bolshoi-trained choreographer Alexei Ratmansky. He has done his best to re-create the 1895 production at the Mariinsky Theater in Ratmansky’s hometown of St. Petersburg.

Historically informed performance, or HIP, is a loaded term, and “Swan Lake” is a loaded ballet. HIP came about when the early music movement discovered that trying to re-create, say, the way a Handel opera might have sounded in the 18th century by using period instruments with what was believed to be period practice techniques proved deadly boring. Eventually, the movement realized that using the old instruments in sprightly, imaginative and contemporary ways instead made the music sound newly vital, and even more so when the staging was startlingly up to date.

Ratmansky’s reconstructed “Swan Lake” does much the opposite with modern instruments and old-fashioned ballet, and it got off to a disorienting start Sunday night. Tchaikovsky’s introduction was played glowingly by the Pacific Symphony in a darkened hall meant to prepare us to enter a different world. But the modern orchestra and distractingly bright audience phones only served to remind us that it is 2025.

The orchestras of the late 19th century had lighter, more spirited-sounding instruments, a quality that matched the choreography of the time. But when Sunday’s curtain rose to archaic scenery, costumes, choreography and acting, it felt, in this context, like wandering into a tacky antique shop.

That said, Ratmansky has a lot to offer. Going back to 1895 can, in fact, signal newness. There is no definitive version of “Swan Lake.” Tchaikovsky revised it after the first 1877 version but died before finishing what became the somewhat standard version in 1895. Even so, choreographers, dancers, producers and even composers have added their two cents’ worth. The ballet can end in triumph or tragedy. Siegfried and his swan-bride Odette may, individually or together, live or drown. “Swan Lake” has become so familiar that modern embellishments become just a lot more baggage.

In this sense, Ratmansky’s back-to-the-future compromise with modernity is an excellent starting place for rethinking not just an iconic ballet but ballet itself and the origins of its singular beauty. The two swan acts display an unfussy delicacy.

Cameron Catazaro, a dashing and athletic Siegfried, and Samantha Hope Galler, a sweetly innocent Odette and vivacious Odile, might have been stick figures magically wondrous once in motion. Meaning was found in Siegfried’s impetuous leap and the Black Swan’s studied 32 fouettés. All else was distraction.

That is precisely the next step Balanchine took 40 years later, in 1935, with his “Serenade,” which uses Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings,” written just after he composed “Swan Lake.” In Balanchine’s first ballet since arriving in the U.S. in 1933, the Russian-Georgian choreographer wanted to create a new kind of ballet for a new world — no story, just breathtaking design.

Although ACB made no mention of the fact, Balanchine moved to L.A. in 1938, three years after the American premiere of “Serenade,” to a house just a few blocks up Fairfax Avenue from Television City. In the few years he spent in Hollywood, he played a significant role in making dance for the movies that entranced the world.

ACB, though, did seem to have movies on its mind in the darkened soundstage with the dancers lit as though in a black-and-white film. But with the audience on bleachers very close to the makeshift stage, the musicians unseen behind the seats and the dancers up close, there was also a stark intimacy that exposed the exacting effort in re-creating the beauty of Balanchine’s steps. The effect was of being in the moment and, at the same time, going into the future.

“Serenade” was preceded by the premiere of “The Euterpides,” a short ballet with a score by Alma Deutscher. The 20-year-old British composer, pianist, violinist and conductor wrote her first opera, “Cinderella,” which has been produced by Opera San José and elsewhere, at 10. “The Euterpides” is her first ballet, and it offers its own brand of time travel.

Each variation on a Viennese waltz tune for strings and piano represents one of the classical Greek muses. The score sounds as though it could have been written in Tchaikovsky’s day, although Deutscher uses contemporary techniques to reveal each muse’s character. “Pneume,” the goddess of breath, gets an extra beat here and there, slightly skewing the rhythm.

Jones relies on a dance vocabulary, evolved from Balanchine, for the five women, each of whom is a muse, as well as the male Mortal employed for a final pas de deux. History, here, ultimately overwhelms the new staging in a swank contemporary environment.

Gupta makes the strongest conciliation between the then and the now in his brilliant “When the Violin.” On the surface, he invites an intriguing cultural exchange by performing Bach’s solo Violin Partita No. 2 and Sonata No. 3 with Kalluri exploring ways in which she can express mood or find rhythmic activity in selected movements. She wears modern dress and is so attuned to the music that the separation of cultures appears as readily bridgeable as that of historic periods.

Well known in L.A., having joined the Phil in 2007 at age 19, Gupta has gone on to found Street Symphony, which serves homeless and incarcerated communities, and to become an inspirational TED talker. He is a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship and, since leaving the Phil, a regular performer around town in chamber programs and plays a Baroque violin in the L.A.-based music ensemble Tesserae.

For “When the Violin,” Gupta employs a modern instrument in a highly expressive contemporary style, holding notes and expanding time as though a sarabande might turn into a raga. He pauses to recite poetry, be it Sufi or Rilke. His tone is big, bold and gripping, especially in the wonderful acoustics of this small theater. The Bach pieces are tied together by composer Reena Esmail’s affecting solo for “When the Violin,” in which the worlds of Bach, Indian music and Kuchipudi dance all seem to come from the same deep sense of belonging together and belonging here and now.

It took only a violinist and a dancer to show that no matter how enormous the range, the connections are, in such a dance, inevitable.

Sophie Williams’ decade-long dance career has taken her across the globe, from the English National Ballet in London to the Royal New Zealand Ballet and the Texas Ballet Theater, where she’s currently a member of the corps de ballet.

Yet she can count on one hand the number of works she’s performed by a female choreographer.

So when Williams started her own nonprofit ballet company, Pointeworks, in 2023, she knew she wanted to spotlight women, whether choreographers, dancers, costume designers or composers.

“Whenever there is an opportunity, I will utilize the platform to try and bring balance within the ballet world, which most of us haven’t seen in our careers,” Williams, Pointeworks’ artistic director, told The Times.

From its inception, Pointeworks has strived to fill in gaps. Williams was inspired to start the company as a way to provide work for professional dancers during their unpaid summer layoffs. With a lack of opportunities and an abundance of talent in the ballet world, Williams decided to create a group that performs during the off-season.

“[Pointeworks] is a very artist-forward company. It’s creating opportunities for the dancers — giving them new works, collaborations, things that can elevate their careers outside of their structured company season, and be able to provide them a platform during that time as well,” Williams said. “And also for audiences who don’t get to see ballet during the summer because companies are off, they get to see Pointeworks.”

Pointeworks debuted last June with a sold-out performance at the 500-seat Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center in Williams’ hometown of San Diego. This year, the company expanded to the East Coast with three shows at New York City’s Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater in March. After a successful return to San Diego last week, the group is preparing for its first Orange County show Friday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Before the Irvine show, Pointeworks will host its first mentorship program for local students who intend to pursue a professional dance career. Selected dancers will participate in a Pointeworks class on Friday and be paired with a mentor from the company who will continue to guide them over the next year. As of Wednesday, seven students had applied and been accepted, according to marketing and outreach coordinator AvaRose Dillon.

Sisters Claire, Nicole and Emma Von Enck rehearse for their performance of “Chasing Shadows” with Pointeworks.

(Raquel Beauchamp)

Williams received more than 400 applications from choreographers for this season overall, she said. While her goal is to highlight female creatives, anyone is welcome to submit ideas.

Among the pieces commissioned for the New York shows was Laine Habony’s “Chasing Shadows,” choreographed for sisters Claire, Emma and Nicole Von Enck — who had never performed together professionally. Nicole, the eldest sister and Williams’ colleague at Texas Ballet Theater, leapt at the opportunity to collaborate with her siblings, who both dance for New York City Ballet.

Habony, also from New York City Ballet, wanted the project to be accompanied by an original score. So she enlisted Welsh composer Katie Jenkins, whom she met at Revolve Dance Project in Providence, R.I., last summer. The duo later recruited pianist and recent Juilliard graduate Joshua Mhoon to play the live score.

For the Irvine show,Williams, Paige Nyman and Adeline Melcher, all from Texas Ballet Theater, will perform the piece. This will mark the first time that Williams will dance to a composition by a female composer, she said.

“[‘Chasing Shadows’] is just very unique in the sense that it’s a female composer behind the music and a female voice behind the choreography, female costume designer behind what we’re wearing, female lighting designer behind what’s going on the stage,” Nyman said. “It’s just an entirely sisterhood piece.”

In addition to “Chasing Shadows,” the Irvine program includes new commissions from choreographers Reka Gyulai and Heather Nichols; DaYoung Jung’s “It’s Deep, It’s Dark,” which debuted in New York; and Christopher Wheeldon’s “Carousel,” a 2002 pas de deux set to music from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s musical of the same name.

“I think it gives a variety to the audience by commissioning new works, contemporary works, new classical works, but also putting in iconic classics — and ‘Carousel’ is one of those,” Williams said.

Dance careers don’t last forever, so it’s important to take advantage of every moment, Williams said. That’s why she’s passionate about maximizing opportunities both on and offstage.

Sisters Claire, Nicole and Emma Von Enck perform together for the first time professionally.

(Nathan Carlson)

In October, Williams hired interns to help with administrative tasks. Among them was Dillon, Pointeworks’ marketing coordinator and a corps de ballet member at Texas Ballet Theater. This month, she began dancing with Pointeworks as well.

“I want to make sure that Pointeworks is for the dancers first,” Williams said. “So by having dancer perspectives in just every angle — whether that’s marketing, administration, development — if you know what it is to be a dancer and you have been a dancer, I think that it’s a lot more cohesive, putting those interests first.”

In addition to dancing professionally, Dillon takes online classes at Texas Tech University, where she studies public relations and strategic communications.

“I feel like [Pointeworks has] been the perfect supplement to my education, because I’m taking classes on how to write press releases and then I’m writing press releases for Pointeworks,” Dillon said. “I could have never comprehended such a perfect opportunity to align with my goals as an artist and future arts leader and an arts advocate.”

While Dillon is just starting her career, Pointeworks also provides opportunities for more seasoned dancers. For instance, retired dancer Christian Griggs-Drane — previously with the Royal New Zealand Ballet — is the company’s development and fundraising coordinator.

Three years after retiring as a ballerina, Jung continues to work as a choreographer, rehearsal director and dance educator. She and Williams met at Oklahoma City Ballet about nine years ago and reconnected at last year’s National Choreographers Initiative in Irvine.

Even though Jung created “It’s Deep, It’s Dark” with her dancers in just 10 days, she said she appreciated the opportunity to work with such a professional, open-minded group of individuals.

“[Pointeworks] is not just about giving artists a platform. It’s about reshaping the dance landscape, ensuring women’s voices are heard and their vision brought to life,” Jung said. “I feel like I could really take risks, experiment and develop my own artistic language without the limitation in traditional structure. And I think Pointeworks was perfect at it, that I could really explore myself as an artist and as a choreographer.”

Who knows if Kendrick Lamar will sit for a formal deposition in Drake’s ongoing defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group, after Lamar flambéed him on “Not Like Us.” But at SoFi Stadium on Wednesday, Lamar and his co-headliner SZA had a great recurring bit imagining what might happen.

In a fake video montage played between set changeovers, Lamar responded to mock-questioning like, “When you said you want the party to die, was that a metaphor or are you serious?” and “Don’t you think disappearing is a form of attention-seeking?” by blowing him off and phoning in a big order of takeout. SZA then lighted up an enormous joint in the lawyer’s office.

The pair’s Grand National Tour is a triumph of the unbothered. Wednesday’s set — the first of a three-night SoFi stand — was a bountiful, meticulous three-hour show that centered on the camaraderie between two of the most important acts in contemporary music. They had a wicked sense of humor about the performance too. At one point, SZA seduced a giant, slicked-up praying mantis dancer. If only we all had the same leeway when deposed.

Lamar, coming off a pair of Grammy wins for “Not Like Us” and a gleefully petty Super Bowl halftime show, is at perhaps the peak of his career. So it’s worth noting how inspiringly egalitarian this hometown show was — a hierarchy-free split with former TDE labelmate SZA, often fully meshing their sets together for their on-record collaborations. The format brought new energy and understanding into their catalogs, all while the pair gassed each other up as virtuoso live performers.

Kendrick Lamar and SZA at the 2016 Grammys.

(Lester Cohen / WireImage)

On Wednesday, SZA arguably made the most of the stadium-sized opportunity. SZA is a powerhouse vocalist and musical omnivore with a stoner’s comic timing (most recently seen in the charming comedy film “One of Them Days”). But she’s now honed her stagecraft to be on par with any pop royalty. Between “Snooze” and “Crybaby,” she was lifted on wires, revealing a gauze train in the shape of a chrysalis, to spellbinding effect. It took some real mettle to then perform her ballad “Nobody Gets Me” midair.

A surprise cameo from Lizzo paid alms to their long friendship, and a bawdy slice of her verse from Drake’s “Rich Baby Daddy” proved she can own even a nemesis’ material with her charisma. When she spun “Garden (Say It Like Dat)” into “Kitchen,” the dancers’ delightfully goopy, insectoid costumes and monolithic ant sculpture felt like H.R. Giger taking mushrooms on a warm afternoon in Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area.

When she and Lamar shared the stage, as on the Oscar-nominated “All the Stars,” “30 for 30” and their respective solo cuts “Doves in the Wind” and “LOVE.,” there was an alchemy between two superfans, their physical presence across the diamond-shaped catwalks reinvigorating this long-beloved music.

At this point, Lamar’s case for being the best rapper alive is fully closed. Of course he is. Even if you thought the title was a little wobbly after the knotty, skeptical “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” the acid-bath of “Not Like Us” and the L.A-embodying surprise release “GNX” slammed the debate shut as it spun off hit after hit. Who else could make a pitch-perfect indictment of the current American political climate onstage at the Super Bowl halftime show, while needling his most loathed enemy and spinning off memes with just a quick grin in bootcut jeans?

At SoFi, a few miles from his old Compton backyard, he drew from that monumental catalog and recontextualized it for this club-ready, venom-streaked era. The show’s format covered more than 50 songs between the two artists, so even when he only got to a verse or two, there was always something new or bracing. Here, “m.A.A.d. city,” one of his hardest and cruelest street cuts, became a meta-R&B number that made the song even more eerie. On “Humble.,” he was flanked by female dancers posing in vicious geometric forms, physically embodying the ego-check of the song’s chorus.

The Drake flame-war material was delicious fun, from the shots-fired kickoff verse on “Like That” to the relentless, merciless taunts on “Euphoria.” But the “GNX” segments, like the Tupac-conjuring “reincarnated” and the ice-cold “peekaboo” (and, obviously, the great Mustard-y howl of “tv off”) made the case for how this album will continue to reveal new textures and resonate in L.A. lore. There wasn’t room for a five-times-reprised “Not Like Us” like at his history-making 2024 “The Pop Out: Ken & Friends” set. But when he did play it, it was less about his archenemy than about L.A., a city with a new song in the canon, a definitive “Us” who were all alike in screaming it.

It felt poignant that Lamar and SZA reunited again for the set’s closers, the unexpectedly relentless Hot 100 fixture “luther” (now at 13 weeks at No. 1) and “gloria,” Lamar’s bait-and-switch about his complicated relationship to his own writing process. With SZA as his Greek chorus, he ended the night on a note about how all this relentless work was worth it to arrive at real self-understanding. An ally that will never fail, no matter who out there is deposing you.

Jane Rosenberg /Reuters

Cassie’s mother took photographs of daughter’s injuries

US Federal Court