Voice of Dance

Anniversary Waltz
Alonzo King's LINES Ballet
25th Anniversary Performance
Alonzo King's Irregular Pearl, Rasa
Yerba Buena Center for the Performing Arts, San Francisco, CA
November 13, 2007

By
ALLAN ULRICH
allanu815@aol.com
VoiceofDance.com 2007

Laurel Keen and Brett Conway of LINES Ballet. Photo by Marty Sohl.

Better later than never. Previous commitments kept this writer from attending LINES Ballet's 25th anniversary home season until its finale Sunday afternoon (Nov. 11) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater. A packed house, of course. Repeated ovations, naturally, and in a generous gesture you will rarely experience in the dance world, founding artistic director Alonzo King brought on for a bow both the stellar musicians and what looked like the company's entire artistic staff.

No choreographer celebrates a silver anniversary without a lot of help. LINESrise to eminence and the community's growing loyalty (the troupe has just received a $1 million challenge grant) adds up to one of the Bay Area's foremost artistic success stories. 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 to the point where shock has been supplanted with a comfortable familiarity. Not that King can't still astonish us. Rasa, one of this month's two world premieres, augured a new direction in its deployment of dancers, an abstraction mostly for small ensembles, infused with a hint of narrative.

In one way, this landmark season looked very much like a journey around King's continuing musical interests. The choreographer's fascination with ancient European scores yielded Irregular Pearl, which deployed 16 movements by Bach, Handel, Corelli, Vivaldi and others, laced with neo-baroque creations by gambist Roy Wheldon. In their first collaboration with LINES, the five members of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, performing in the YBCA pit, covered themselves with honor.

The nine-part Rasa was even more compelling. King's continuing exploration of musics from other cultures has generated some of his more accomplished work. This third collaboration with the legendary tabla artist Zakir Hussain (joined by violinist Kala Ramnath) steeps the observer in an exotic, evocative landscape fraught with the unpredictable. A portion of this classical Indian-fusion score, brainy yet alarmingly sensual, is pre-recorded and much of it seems improvised. Not since the Pharoah Sanderscollaboration, Ocean, has movement and music seemed so unified in a King work.

What's interesting here is the choreographer's willingness to forego intermittently his obsession with the spiritual implications of skewed balances in favor of an earthier, more suggestive plan. At the beginning, a group cluster (you can't really call it an ensemble) gives way to a section featuring guest Muriel Maffre, a recently retired San Francisco Ballet principal, who becomes a pawn in the hands of the men. We get floor rolls and we see Maffre's erect figure propelled back and forth between the guys like a shuttlecock. Suggestions of an initiation rite linger on the surface (they seem to apply to this exquisite dancer now launched on a post-SFB career).

We are on more familiar King territory with a scorching duet for Laurel Keen and Brett Conway. Here the risky deployment of arms, weight displacements and a couple of daring lifts lace the technical demands with a tonal layering that rivet the attention; we feel emotionally invested in their exchange; and that is not something you can claim about every King dance.

New, also, to King's style is the emphasis on intricate footwork, Corey Scott Gilbert, Keelan Whitmore, and, especially Ricardo Zayas all etched remarkably complex patterns, inspired, no doubt, by the sounds coming from the pit. One can only hope that tour presenters can spring for hiring Hussain for their performances; a recording will simply not be the same thing.

I have some qualms about the costuming and the d'cor for Rasa (the rising and descending curtain at the rear seems a visual distraction, rather than an organic trapping of the piece). The cluster at the end suggests a voyage of a cyclical nature. The nine-member company, which also includes Jon Michael Schert, Meredith Webster, Ashley Jackson and Caroline Rocher (not long ago, a star attraction at Dance Theatre of Harlem), is as accomplished and as risk-taking as any that LINES has fielded in the past two decades.

Irregular Pearl delivers fewer surprises and, at 35 minutes, seems arbitrary and slightly overextended. One can understand why King was so attracted to scores with a figured bass, but, except in a generalized way, the relationship between sound and movement, remains elusive. What, at first, looks like a male rivalry (Scott-Gilbert, Whitmore) evolves into a portrait of the current company, during which every member is afforded a chance to glitter. I do not understand the appearance of a large box, which suggests a commercial for a soap powder. Still, Rocher and Webster found empathy in a duet set to a portion of Corelli's "Christmas" Concerto. Flexed feet, arched backs and insolent piqu's seem to strive for a meaning that is not immediately forthcoming.

As so often happens with LINES, the glory was in the dancing. But, if a revival is in the future, an Irregular Pearl Suite might be a good idea.