SPRING SEASON PERFORMANCE
MAY 18, 2025
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LINES Ballet’s 2025 Spring Season features choreographer Alonzo King’s first-ever collaboration with American jazz trumpeter/composer Ambrose Akinmusire—a spiritual seeker in the grand tradition of musical aspirationalists. Audiences will also have the opportunity to see King’s timeless work Scheherazade, which returns in full to the stage after over a decade.
Akinmusire has proved himself one of the most vital and deft trumpeters of his generation. “Every so often a trumpeter comes along who redraws the instrument’s role within jazz: Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown, Chet Baker, Wynton Marsalis, Freddie Hubbard, etc. Ambrose Akinmusire has the potential to join that crowd,” wrote the All Music Guide. Akinmusire’s music overflows with both beauty and rigor, profound personal feeling, and fiery virtuoso playing. What one hears throughout his work is an artist plumbing the depths of himself and the world around him. According to The New York Times, “Ambrose Akinmusire has been making some of the most intimate spellbinding music of his career…even in its simplicity, Akinmusire’s trumpet can feel almost dangerously tender.”
Alonzo King’s Scheherazade is a re-envisioning of the ancient collection of Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic stories of One Thousand and One 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 Grammy Award-winning 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 the company founder Serge Diaghilev’s spirit of cutting-edge artistic collaboration, immersing audiences in a luminescent and richly textured world.
To learn more, visit our Spring Season webpage.
Photography: Alonzo King LINES Ballet | Dancer: Caroline Rocher Barnes | © RJ Muna
