Repertoire :: Wheel in the Middle of the Field :: Scheherazade :: Refraction :: DUST and LIGHT :: The Radius of Convergence :: The Steady Articulation of Perseverance :: Rasa :: Migration :: The Moroccan Project :: Splash
Wheel in the Middle of the Field (Spring 2010)
Alonzo King’s most recent creation, set to some of the most ethereally beautiful vocal music ever created by Handel, Brahms, Fauré, Strauss, Schubert, John Sheppard, and Reynaldo Hahn, is a collaboration between the extraordinary dancers of LINES Ballet and a talented group of young opera singers from the San Francisco Opera’s Adler Fellows program. An intimate resonance between song and movement unfolds onstage, as the breathtaking voices of the four singers—soprano, mezzo-soprano, counter-tenor, and baritone—rise in unison with the unique grace of the LINES Ballet dancers.
Scheherazade (Fall 2009)
My intention was to grapple with the metaphysical meaning behind Scheherazade and present that meaning in its essence. Scheherazade is the symbol of the savior. She weaves tales not to save her own life, but to save humanity from its unending retributive response to injury.
–Alonzo King
Alonzo King’s Scheherazade is a re-envisioning of the ancient collection of Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic stories of 1,001 Nights. The exquisite dancers of LINES Ballet present a vision of the intimate transformative potential these stories possess: the way that we are offered a chance to listen to a voice that can change our lives, the power of art to illuminate all the chambers of our hearts. The new score by tabla master Zakir Hussain re-interprets the original music by Rimsky-Korsakov, incorporating traditional Persian as well as Western instruments. Commissioned by the Monaco Dance Forum to inaugurate the Centenary of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, Alonzo King LINES Ballet’s Scheherazade honors Diaghilev’s spirit of cutting-edge artistic collaboration, immersing audiences in a luminescent and richly textured world.
Refraction (Fall 2009)
When Jason Moran played the Village Vanguard in New York a few years ago, he opened the set with a little layering of recorded sounds in which he heard a harmonious synthesis: there was a slice of Bartok, which slid into a rap phrase laid over a Delta-blues guitar lick, and then, rolling out over the top, the sonorous tones of Sir John Gielgud, the eminent Shakespearean actor, declaiming those lines from The Merchant of Venice: “Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music/ Creep in our ears.” Named “the most provocative thinker in current jazz” by Rolling Stone, and recently honored as one of the “37 Under 36: America's Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences” by the Smithsonian, Jason Moran is both steeped in the traditions of jazz and committed to pushing its boundaries. He can pare a rare Duke Ellington song down to its bones, splinter the rhythm a little, and find its affinity with Handel’s Messiah. He combines technical virtuosity with an open-ended approach to jazz; the New York Times called the Vanguard performances “pliable, hot, telepathic.”
Moran is also a fearless explorer of the musicality of our everyday lives. He has been invited to lecture at places like the Kennedy Center and the NY MoMA, and when he talks about hearing—about really listening to the world as it surrounds us, chiming and clanging and maybe whistling a little as it turns on its axis—it is clear that he has a gift for finding the songs that underlie the unnoticed and the ubiquitous. He once recorded the cell-phone conversation of his guide to Istanbul and created a sonic collage from it, a symphony of language that elevated and transformed a voice into complex music.
“I am always hoping my music will move its audience,” Jason Moran said about his collaboration with Alonzo King LINES Ballet. “And, as a young musician, I often wonder what effect my music would have on conscious movement.”
Moran’s collaboration with LINES Ballet, Refraction, which premiered in Fall 2009 in San Francisco, marked the first time Moran had composed for dance. He confided that his first experience watching Alonzo King and the LINES dancers in the studio was “a breakthrough—I wasn’t ready for what I witnessed,” and is intent on listening for the underlying music of their movement, the song that hums in the body: the wondrous creeping of music in our ears.
DUST and LIGHT (Spring 2009)
In a landscape that shifts like the clouds, dappling the stage with soft light and then bathing the dancers in silvery radiance, Alonzo King brings out the emotional intimacy of dance. The LINES Ballet dancers move in harmonious counterpoint to each other, setting off the rich variations of Arcangelo Corelli’s Baroque music against Francis Poulenc’s otherworldly sacred choral odes. Each body is replete with radiant potential, as if the stage were filled with a dozen moons—or perhaps with a dozen suns, since, as Alonzo King says, “a tendu isn't just the straightening of the leg but a ray of light radiating from the sun.” As the duets and trios of dancers culminate in an exuberant ensemble, the intimacy of the piece expands and opens outwards, immersing the audience in luminous grace.
The Radius of Convergence (Fall 2008)
The Radius of Convergence draws an interior geometry of beauty from the LINES Ballet dancers—in one moment they fold inwards, and then movement unfurls from their bodies, is flung from their fingertips. There are times when the dancers seem to be balancing on water, and other times when they seem to be drinking in the light. Alonzo King’s choreography exhibits the dignity of motion as well as the tension of intersection; the piece implies a tangled kind of togetherness, in which we all lean towards each other as we turn on our shared, slanted axis. King, with his unique vision of ballet as a universal geometry, sees each limb as a ray of light, and calls upon the dancers to radiate—and they fill the darkened theater with their light.
The Radius of Convergence premiered in Fall 2009, and was praised by the San Francisco Chronicle for its “rapturous spools of motion” and “gorgeous” eloquence of movement; Ballet.co.uk noted “its spectacular male ensemble passages” and “labyrinthine movements.”
THE STEADY ARTICULATION OF PERSEVERANCE (Spring 2008)
This pas de deux is an illuminating glimpse into the reason Alonzo King calls his dances
“thought structures”: it demonstrates the potential of dance to be raw and infinite, to unfold beauty to its very edges. With tenderness and intensity, The Steady Articulation of Perseverance transcends the horizons of ballet to reach toward immanence and possibility.
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.
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.
Alonzo King's choreography is a call to the spirit, and also an intimate form of listening for the spirit's response.
“the pleasure of gradual understanding is considerable in “Migration"...
The small stabbing push of the feet and hands, the arching bodies, the slow drift and fast agitation… taut bodies and quiet eloquence…an intriguing wonder”
-New York Times
The Moroccan Project (2005)
This piece sets the vibrant drumming of Gnawa ceremonies as a backdrop for the haunting strains of oud (lute), violin, and women’s devotional singing. In this landscape of shifting rhythms and echoing voices, the extraordinary dancers of LINES Ballet move with unexpected intimacy and flawless grace. The musicians draw on diverse forms of North African music, including Berber (Amazigh) songs from the Middle Atlas Mountains, Gnawa rituals originating in West Africa, and a form of popular song in Morocco called Chaabi. The plaintive energy and melodic blending of the Moroccan songs is made tangible as Alonzo King’s choreography reflects the intricate rhythms of emotion and community.
Splash (Spring 2002)
By turns lushly evocative and a little zany, this endearingly playful pas de deux is set to a lively and varied score that brings Italian cinematic legend Nino Rota together with Francis Poulenc and the experimental American composer Leslie Stuck. The slightly madcap pace of Nino Rota’s music, which careens between the charmingly flippant and the exuberantly animated, has a subtle edge; Alonzo King’s nuanced choreography brings out that edge, and balances right along it. The dance can rise to a symphonic crescendo of fiercely beautiful movement, and then it can swing suddenly sideways into the realm of loopy unpredictability; still, underneath, there is a hint of the painted tear, that circus sadness, the mood of Fellini’s La Strada. Les Stuck plays off Rota’s cheerfully off-kilter style, and the Poulenc sections bring a serene gravitas that binds the whole score together.
