Lines Ballet : Repertoire

Repertoire :: The Radius of Convergence :: Long River, High Sky
Irregular Pearl :: Rasa :: Migration

The Radius of Convergence (Fall 2008)

"When you reach a spiritual level," says legendary tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, "you become the instrument yourself.� Sanders, a Grammy Award-winner who played with Sun Ra as well as with John Coltrane�s revolutionary jazz ensemble in the 1960�s before pursuing his own global vision of free jazz, has created several scores for LINES Ballet since 1994, and shares Alonzo King's philosophy that art can express a truth: something underneath the surface, something deeply held in the soul. �The spirit tells me what to do and that�s it,� Sanders says of creating music for LINES Ballet. With electrifying, raw grace, and a harmonic depth that goes down to the very last note, Sanders can crack the air open like blue-white lightning; the resonances linger to drench the stage, like rain that has been a long time coming.

Shaolin Monks Collaboration: Long River High Sky
(Premiere Spring 2007, Shaolin Temple USA Collaboration Spring 2008)

With utter calm and fierce precision, the dancers of LINES Ballet and the Shaolin monks of China create an unprecedented synthesis of Eastern and Western classical forms, as if ascending together from the stage to the heavens through pure, gorgeous intensity of movement. The Shaolin monks practice a form of martial arts developed in the 6th century CE, when an Indian monk named Bodhidharma came to their temple on Songshan Mountain. Blending the indigenous Chinese form of self-defense (called wushu) with a series of movements based on yoga, Bodhidharma taught the Shaolin monks to breathe strength into their bodies; they learned to soar into leaps as if they were cranes spreading their wings, and to land as silently as tigers prowling in the mountains.

Alonzo King�s visionary choreography is renowned for its ability to connect audiences to a profound sense of shared humanity�of vulnerability and tenderness, but also of furious abandon and exhilarating freedom�and for its unique capacity to imbue classical ballet with new expressive potential. The project between Alonzo King�s Lines Ballet and the Shaolin monks, like Bodhidharma�s integration of yoga and wushu, represents both a blending of very different cultural traditions�Western classical ballet and Chinese martial arts�and, at the same time, a recognition that these arts of movement are convergent and intertwined.
Visit Shaolin website for detailed information >>

Irregular Pearl (Fall 2007)

Irregular Pearl was the original meaning of the word Baroque: a form of beauty made in layers of iridescence, completely and uniquely itself. Baroque music finds its expression in complex harmonies--beyond the linear polyphony of Renaissance music--and encourages a surprising freedom within its structure. In the Baroque period (c. 1600-1750), for the first time, musicality meant that performers would draw on their own dynamic creativity in order to improvise around the bass line. Not until the advent of jazz would this demanding and inspiring openness, called figured bass, be so closely bound to the act of musical creation.

The process of embellishing and filling out a musical line is a kind of dance in itself: artist and music move together in counterpoint, finding moments of contrast and convergence, building a luminescence and singularity into the piece. Working outwards from the center, the artists of the Baroque immersed themselves in the harmonic structure of the music, and gave back to it something of themselves. Baroque aesthetics tend to privilege exuberance and exploration over the lifelessly correct work of art, and thus its artists seek to imbue each creation with their own spirits.

The choreography of Alonzo King, with its natural affinity for complex musicality, engages the same dynamism and openness we find in Baroque music. Infusing the classical form of ballet with new vibrancy, Alonzo King uncovers the freedom that lies inside of the form itself. His choreography gives the dancers of LINES Ballet a way of transcending virtuosity to achieve a unique beauty, a sense of unforced artistry; a luminescence that comes from within.

Rasa (Fall 2007)

Tabla music began as dancing music, in Northern Indian courts in the early 1700s, and its hypnotic intensity and complex rhythms convey the strong feeling that they are meant to move the body. There is an enthralling quality to the cyclical, accentual repetitions of rhythms that have been handed down from master to student in the six major gharanas, or stylistic traditions, of tabla music. Between the two drums that make up the tabla--the smaller dayan on the right, and the bayan on the left--percussive resonance and rhythmic interplay come together like a song, so that tabla music sometimes sounds more like a melody than a series of drumbeats.

Zakir Hussain, son of the legendary tabla player Ustad Alla Rakha, belongs to the Punjab Gharana, but has chosen to create music with an array of artists from the Karnatic tradition of Southern India, the international Silk Road Project, and Western drummers such as Mickey Hart. He is the preferred accompanist for many of India's classical musicians and dancers, including noted Kathak dancer Antonia Minnecola, to whom he is married. Zakir Hussain began touring before he was twelve years old, and has received numerous awards over the course of his illustrious career in world music, including a Grammy for his collaborative album, Planet Drum. This is his third collaboration with Alonzo King, following Who Dressed You Like A Foreigner in 1998 and Following the Subtle Current Upstream, which premiered in 2000 in the repertory of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and was brought into LINES Ballet's repertory in 2006.

The tabla, with its rich texture of rhythmic patterns, is the main form of percussion in the Hindustani music of North India, but its origins also reveal the interconnections of musical history. In fact, the Hindi and Urdu word tabla is derived from an Arabic word for drum, and even further back from Aramaic and Middle Persian roots. The tabla bridges folk, semi-classical, and classical Hindustani music genres, and was intrinsic to the lost dances of the tawaif-s, who performed in 18th-century courts.

This collaboration between Alonzo King and Zakir Hussain is thus both a continuation of a deep tradition--the interdependence of dance and tabla music as art forms--and an expression of the contemporary global vision of both artists. The complex rhythmic systems of tabla, like the technique of western classical ballet, demand the devotion and utter concentration of the artists who practice them; and yet, at the heart of the music and the dance, there is a sense of openness, of arising in joy, of soaring beyond the structures and being held there, aloft.

Migration: The hierarchical migration of birds and mammals (Spring 2006)

A breath stirs in the body; a tiny crack appears in the shell; the dance begins with the moment of emergence. This piece explores the awakening of complex bodies, and the beauty of their constant evolution into new forms. A fossil is made because time, writing on bodies, turns them into stone. Yet the stone is made from the same substance as the eggshell, the snail's shell, and the seashell.

Alonzo King evokes the feeling of home that is born into us, the one that guides us wordlessly back to our wondrous origins. For an instant, we remember that moment when the eggshell trembles and cracks, or when the intricate pattern of a chambered nautilus has finally been engraved entirely in stone, and disappears. There is a feeling that the dancers' exquisite lines are part of a beauty that we know by heart, if we could only let ourselves remember.

When the music laps at the dancers' limbs, they fold into themselves, as if encased in shells that have been etched by salt and time. As the rhythms of heartbeat and tides pulse through them, they arise. The dancers curve into the space around their bodies, pulling it into new configurations, grappling with each other between tension and trust. There are moments of soaring into vast spaces, of wheeling and diving with a complete and precise freedom. There are also infinite ways to find a sense of home, and to come back to the beginning again; and so, each dancer alights with unique grace and an extraordinary sense of presence.

Alonzo King's choreography is a call to the spirit, and also an intimate form of listening for the spirit's response.