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Press
Reviews
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Berkshire Eagle Online
Diamond Cutters In Dance
Saturday, July 26, 2008
"These dancers could cut diamonds" was the way Jacob's Pillow director Ella Baff introduced the dance of Alonzo King's LINES Ballet Company." No better description is needed. Across their ranks, these exceptionally tall, rangy performers stab, pierce, and slice the space around them for multi-faceted ballet that sends out sparks. And once again, in this international festival season, the music is full partner to the dance, as vivid as to seem a physical presence onstage...
read more >>
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The Rogovoy Report
Alonzo King's Lines Ballet at Jacob's Pillow
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Alonzo King's Lines Ballet performed two stunning, vital, wholly original works of modern ballet last night, as it will continue to do through July 27. Rarely if ever does this dancegoer immediately wish he could see a dance again, repeated immediately, but in the case of Migration, which opened the program, I wasn't alone in feeling there was so much to take in, so much beauty to absorb, so much color to appreciate, so much athletic grace to marvel over, that it was impossible to get it all in just one sitting...
read more >>
•
MidiLibre.com, Montpellier
The Expression of Emotions, King and the Shaolin monks
Tuesday, July 5, 2008
The Corum Theater was sold out, yesterday, for the premiere of Long River, High Sky, performed by Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet. This event was long-awaited and much talked about, as once again the San Francisco-based choreographer daringly overturned conventions by inviting to the stage, alongside his dancers, a group of artists who are hardly dancers in the usual sense of the word: in this case, seven Shaolin monks...
read more >>
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San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com
When Dancers Hit Stage with Martial Artists, it's a Real Kick
May 30, 2008
Usually the phrase "back by popular demand" is just so much marketing spin, but apparently the word really has gotten out about Lines Ballet's collaboration with Shaolin monks. This week's entire encore run of "Long River High Sky" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater is sold out, and Wednesday's opening-night audience was on its feet the moment the curtain fell...
read more >>
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Contra Costa Times
Lines Ballet Leaps Back Into Kung Fu Collaboration
May 31, 2008
San Francisco's Lines Ballet has never been a stranger to cross-cultural collaboration. Long before mixing idioms was commonplace in the concert hall, company founder and artistic director Alonzo King began to inflect ballet with fractured, zigzagging shapes that held echoes of Asia, Indonesia and Africa...
read more >>
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DanceViewTimes
Meditation Through Movement
May 30, 2008
It’s not difficult to understand why LINES Ballet packed them in at the reprise of “Long River, High Sky”, Alonzo King’s 2007 collaboration with wushu practicing Shaolin monks from China. The almost two-hour East meets West show proved that under the right circumstances different cultures indeed can meet...
read more >>
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Ballet.co.uk
Lines Ballet with Shaolin Monks ‘Long River, High Sky’
May 31, 2008
Given classical en haut epaulement with bends, reaches and waist or hips as fulcrum characteristic of Alonzo King’s choreography, which also eschews eye contact, contrasted with the forceful jumps, turns and flips of the Shaolin monks, it seemed filigree meeting ch’i...
read more >>
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San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com
Lines Ballet celebrates 25 years with two world premieres
Nov 5, 2007
In a quarter-century, Alonzo King's small, sleek company has risen from
playing tiny theaters to touring the country and now the world; worked
with a dazzling array of musical collaborators hailing from Morocco,
Central Africa, Japan and beyond; and essentially, through these nine
dancers' twisted, tangled movement and King's earnest yet urgent
spirituality, broken the mold of what ballet can be...
read more >>
•
Voice of Dance
Anniversary Waltz
Nov 13, 2007
No single-choreographer company hereabouts (certainly not in the ballet
sphere) has soared so irresistibly and kept its place at the top. No
other troupe has produced so many dances over two-plus decades. In
those 25 years, King has refined his extreme classicism...
read more >>
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DanceViewTimes
A Quarter of a Century Young
Nov 2, 2007
Towards the end of this breathtaking music/dance interaction became so
intense that the dancers--taking turns in every faster
variations--seemed to atomize in front of our eyes.
read more >>
•
Le Monde
A Dream As Dance
July 3, 2007
[Alonzo King] possesses a sort of magical science of gesture and
spatiality. The technique is classically based--the women are en
pointe--but the capacity for choreographic innovation is boundless.
The cascades of steps, flooding the stage, fill the body entirely.
read more >>
• San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com
'Retired' S.F. ballerina dazzles with Lines troupe in Europe
June 30, 2007
Muriel Maffre's retirement didn't last long. The French-born, longtime San Francisco Ballet principal, who took her last bow with the company in early May, has re-established her connection with Alonzo King's Lines Ballet.
read more >>
• San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com
Ballet and kung fu well-matched dance partners in Lines premiere
April 16, 2007
For those who don't know, it's worth stating plainly: Alonzo King is the real deal as a choreographer, one of the few bona fide visionaries in the ballet world today, and we are fortunate to have him and his Lines Ballet in San Francisco.
read more >>
• La Provincia
King: The Classic That Transforms
February 25, 2007
Electrifying, playful, stylistically perfect and strangely new: this is the eclectic style of Alonzo King, the African-American choreographer who opens the “Rassegna La Danza” series with two Italian premieres of his work. These pieces, Migration and Sky Clad, near-paradigmatic testaments to a choreographic language born of academic ballet, but one which grafts onto this base not only contemporary influences, but also the commingling of many cultures and many traditions.
read more >>
• San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com
Panel asks: just what is black
dance?
January 28, 2007
A lot has changed since Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus took the 1940s concert dance world by storm, since Arthur Mitchell startled audiences by partnering white ballerinas at the New York City Ballet, since Donald McKayle created "Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder" to protest injustices in the South.
read more >>
San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com
Ballet: Last Frontier
January 27, 2007
Growing up, Aesha Ash knew that black women were rare in American ballet companies. But joining the corps of New York City Ballet, the troupe created by 20th century dance behemoth George Balanchine, was still a shock.
read more >>
• SanDiego.com
Alonzo King's Lines Ballet at California Center for the Arts
October 3, 2006
As a critic, it's my policy not to join a standing ovation unless half the audience members are already on their feet—I don't want to "make the news" of an ovation by starting one. But it was hard not to leap from my seat at the end of the transcendent "Sky Clad" by Alonzo King's Lines Ballet.
read more >>
• The New York Sun
Another Big Five-Course Meal
October 5, 2006
First up was Alonzo King's LINES Ballet, a San Francisco troupe full of gorgeous, lithe dancers.
read more >>
• San Francisco Chronicle
Saturday, April 15, 2006
By Rachel Howard, Special to The Chronicle
Lines Ballet steps into wondrous, foreign world with favorite work...
read
more >>
• Dance Review: Alonzo King's LINES Ballet,
2006 Spring Home Season
Monday, April 17, 2006
By Allan Ulrich, Voice of Dance
The 10 dancers add up to the slickest, sleekest, most alluring collection
of-movement...
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more >>
• Dance Review: LINES in perfect balance
Monday, October 03, 2005
By Jane Vranish, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Few companies deliver a "wow factor" like
Alonzo King's LINES Ballet...
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more >>
• Alonzo King's LINES Ballet
Stacy Ashley | In the Spotlight, Inc.
When going to see a ballet company, there is a certain amount of expectation.
The music, choreography, costumes...
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more >>
• HANDEL-ING MODERN BALLET, OLD MOROCCO
Paul Hertelendy| artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco
Bay Area music & dance
Week of Nov. 6-15, 2005 Vol. 8, No. 39
Mix up modern ballet with traditional Moroccan music and you have a
wild, high-energy fling with dancers all but flying off the stage...
read
more >>
•
San Francisco Sentinel
Alonzo King Receives 2nd Annual Mayor's Art Award
October 1, 2008
“Alonzo King is a San Francisco treasure, embodying the best of San Francisco, the creative excellence and diverse culture of this city,” said Mayor Newsom. “He has given equally to the dance community internationally and the community at-large here in San Francisco, and I am honored to bestow the 2nd Annual Mayor’s Art Award in his name.”
read more >
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The New York Sun
Jacob's Pillow Creativity Award to Alonzo King
June 12, 2008
Shaolin monks, jazz musicians, and the Pygmies of Central Africa are just some of the people choreographer Alonzo King has invited onstage to perform with the classically trained dancers of his LINES Ballet, the company he founded 26 years ago in San Francisco. These collaborations have helped establish Mr. King internationally as a choreographer and teacher who simultaneously embraces classical ballet and other forms of dance and movement. And now they've helped him become the recipient of the second annual Jacob's Pillow Award for Creativity...
read more >
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Examiner.com
Martial Arts and Dance Meld Into One
May 26, 2008
Lines Ballet director Alonzo King explains how his troupe came to collaborate with the Shaolin monks on “Long River High,” a production that returns for a second year beginning Wednesday. He says: “An acquaintance brought the monks by our studio, we traded some movements and that was it, I canceled the project I had planned and said, I want to work on this. The bottom line is that they are beautiful movers.”
read more >
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San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com
Alonzo King's Ballet Turns 25
Oct 28, 2007
The changes that quarter century have brought are astonishing: Lines is
now internationally renowned... King's style, so nascent 25 years ago,
is now fully formed and instantly recognizable: classical, yet tangled
and twisted, exquisitely weird shapes melting into vulnerable human
gestures.
read more >
•
Ebony
King of Dance: Alonzo King and his LINES Ballet mark 25
Nov 11, 2007
Since its inception in 1982, critics and dance lovers alike have
praised LINES for its global and artistic vision as well as its
technical virtuosity.
read more >
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Voice of Dance
Another Year, Another 10
Dec 20, 2007
The anniversary of the year was LINES Ballet's 25th. That this
single-choreographer contemporary ballet troupe has continued to
prosper in grave financial times is attributable entirely to founding
artistic director Alonzo King's artistry and to the support he has
mustered within the community. Considering how many companies initially
blossom and wither on the vine, King's steady rise and his refusal to
diverge from his aesthetic principles is a continuing source of wonder.
read more >
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San Francisco Bay Guardian
King of the Dance: A True Innovator Celebrates 25-plus Years of Ballet and Beyond
Oct 31, 2007
Aside from his choreography, King's greatest contribution might turn
out to be his challenging of preconceptions about dance, specifically
ballet. To question the status quo is perhaps the birthright of this son
and grandson of prominent civil rights leaders in Albany, Ga...
read more >
•
Dance Magazine
Breathtaking Lines: 25 years of Alonzo King's Vision
Nov 1, 2007
[Audiences] are drawn to King's daring, skewed classicism, his arresting
choice of music, his enveloping sensuality, and the experience of watching
dancers simultaneously stretch their limbs and expose their souls in public.
read more >
•
Alonzo King has an angular approach to choreography
North Country Times
September 27, 2006
Reflecting the passion of a geometry professor, choreographer Alonzo King has an uncanny appreciation for lines and how their combinations create shapes out of the human form.
read more >
• Finding Her Way
Rachel Howard | San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Aesha Ash was ready to quit dancing six months ago. Then she met Alonzo
King...
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more >>
• Alonzo King: Dancing with the Moon
Nicole Plett | Dance Advance
It’s midmorning in a sunlight-drenched, second-floor dance studio
at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts...
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more >>