It seems more than a bit irreverent to refer to the “Alonzo King experience” as if it were one of those intensive long-weekend self-help seminars offered in some town on the windswept Northern California coast. But choreographer King hasn’t achieved his international reputation without meeting certain expectations. He met them again Friday (Oct. 23) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Novellus Theater, where LINES Ballet opened its two-week fall season with a gala performance and a world premiere.
Those expectations include an astonishingly flexible and fearless team of dancers (five men, four women this season), arresting choices of music (here played live), an intense, brooding atmosphere and a movement style that begins with a ballet base, subjects the body to all manner of non-balletic flourishes, yet ultimately remains faithful to a classical ideal. You can never escape the feeling during a LINES performance that King, who launched the company 27 years ago, is testing his dancers, not just technically, but psychically, too. Every physical feat King throws at them seems to prepare them for the next trial.
You can see that happening in the new Refractions, but what you hear may be equally germane. For this work, King has commissioned a remarkably appealing score of wide-ranging moods from New York-based master jazz pianist Jason Moran, who was joined in the pit by Tarus Mateen, bass; and Nasheet Waits, drums (they will be heard via recording during the second week of the run). Not since Ocean, King’s earlier collaboration with Pharoah Sanders, has one felt this close a relationship between music and movement in this artist’s work.
In its choreography, the 35-minute Refractions (the title apparently appended at the 11th hour) also shifts the emphasis from the legs to the upper torso and arms of the dancers. King often imposes freezes on his soloists and, in format, duets frequently morph into trios, as a third, late-entering dancer becomes a principal in the next section. Stylistically, this lends the piece an unusual fluidity. Participants don’t so much test each other’s balances as they seem to rearrange their extremities into one daring sculptural tableau after another. Thus, King imposes an intimacy on the work, a refreshing mellowness. The full complement of dancers materializes infrequently, and Refractions confounds expectations by ending, not with a surging unison, but with a quiet, weighted duet for Meredith Webster and Brett Conway.
Balances are not so much challenged as rearranged, as Caroline Rocher and David Harvey demonstrate in their opening salvo. She twists her torso, flexes her feet, revolves her elbows and offers her elbows. He tugs at her hair, encumbers her waist. Meanwhile, steely rods descend from the flies, lit dramatically by Axel Morgenthaler. (They multiply near the end, but their presence remains enigmatic, to say the least.) Later, King imbues simple walking entrances from the wings (Ricardo Zayas, Corey Scott-Gilbert), with numinous power.
In the 11 sections of Refractions, we get soft romantic riffs from the keyboard to complement a lyric episode for Rocher and Keelan Whitmore; a drum solo propels Conway across the stage in a carefully composed frenzy. Webster and Laurel Keen, all expressive legs and uncommon speed, offer a jaunty scherzo. King has imposed a palindromic structure on the piece: It begins and ends with a duet; and in the seventh section, the entire cast joins hands briefly for a daisy chain, before the group disperses before your eyes. Robert Rosenwasser’s simple costumes, pastel-hued shorts and tunics, keep your attention focused where it belongs—on the dancers. Rarely in the past decade has LINES fused pyrotechnics and personality as it does here. But would somebody please explain those descending knitting needles?
The Moroccan Project (2005; in 12 sections) is another of King’s juxtapositions of music from other cultures and movement mostly from this one. The choreography acknowledges its inspiration in the occasional, slinky descent to the floor and the sporadic undulating torso. But much of the emotive power is generated by the six musicians of El Hamideen, whose traditional Moroccan vocal and instrumental sounds would compel, even in the absence of visuals.
But, fortunately, visuals abound. Again, entire company numbers yield to small groups, and King rarely lets the movement (set in front of a low cinderblock wall) descend to the level of cultural tourism. Promenades proliferate. Scott-Gilbert’s turns astonish. Most memorable of the episodes: a women’s trio (rare in King’s work) uniting Webster, Rocher and veteran Keen who, in their articulate transitions, seem the epitome of contemporary classicism.
Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet continues through Sunday, Nov. 1, at Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard St., San Francisco. (415) 978-ARTS. www.ybca.org.
For more information:
Did you see the performance? Write your own review in the public reviews forum or comment below!
Read more of Allan Ulrich's reviews in his archives
*Disclaimer: The views of Allan Ulrich are not necessarily the views of Voice of Dance
.jpg)
