Alonzo King's LINES Ballet, The Moroccan Project, Handel
Nov 7, 2005
By
ALLAN ULRICH
allan@voiceofdance.com
Laurel Keen and Brett Conway of Alonzo King's LINES Ballet. Photo by Marty Sohl.
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Looking as glamorous as ever, LINES Ballet swept into the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater Friday evening (Nov. 4) with a pair of superb additions to the company roster, two premieres by founding artistic director Alonzo King and a protracted speech and audience participation routine by the company's windy executive director, Barry Hessenius, a former California state bureaucrat who seemed to think the evening was about him.
It most definitely wasn't. Although it took a while to get to the dancing, when the curtain finally rose, the pleasures were familiar and genuine. We got an impressive physical production; Axel Morgenthaler's lighting, along with Jennifer Tipton's, is the most expressive in the dance world. We also got dancing of sleekness, fervid sensuality and commitment so deep you suspect these performers would jetoff the nearest cliff if King requested it.
There are some fresh and inviting faces in the nine-member LINES. Absent in this 23rd annual opening night show were Gregory Dawson (retired) and Maurya Kerr (on leave). Bowing at home were Adam McKinney and Aesha Ash. McKinley, tallish and very nicely proportioned, arrives from stints at several companies, including B'jart Ballet Lausanne and the Milwaukee Ballet. Ash attracted much attention in the New York City Ballet corps before she departed for Switzerland; much is expected of this dancer with an elegant line and endless spine.
I'm going on this way, because neither of King's new pieces, Handel and The Moroccan Project, ranks among his finest offerings. The latter is the more satisfying and more salvageable of the pair. It is the latest in a series of King's dances fusing elements of African culture with the choreographer's brand of skewed classicism. And like those that preceded it, The Moroccan Project is complemented in the YBC pit by a consort (numbering seven this time) of splendid instrumentalists and vocalists; their traditional offerings will be heard live only during the home season (through Sunday). Robert Rosenwasser's scenic design, consisting of twin hanging cloth panels and a curved brick wall, is perfectly reasonable.
The full-company work, a 15-part suite preceded by an instrumental overture, abounds in cultural references, particularly the sinuous traversals of the stage by the men (first McKinney, then Brett Conway and Prince Credell, all bare-chested, in long skirts), who suggest all manner of native fauna. King is sparing with his group sections, and the substance of the solos often seems anecdotal. Legs bend dramatically, arms windmill. The music, blending percussion and oud and pungent vocalism, occasionally inspires a literal and refreshingly rhythmic response in King. A Berber lullaby finds McKinney and Conway stretched on the floor while, on the other side of the stage, Ash extends her limbs. A mirror duet unites Meredith Webster and Laurel Keen, all controlled developp's.
Aesha Ash of Alonzo King's LINES Ballet. Photo by Marty Sohl.
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And we encounter qualities rare in King's intense dances: charm and visual wit. It was hard to resist Ash's repeated attempt to penetrate a wall of four men (Conway, McKinney, Credell, John Michael Schert) and watch them tumble and realign. Ash lent her assignment irresistible flair.
The problem here is that there's insufficient invention in The Moroccan Project to fill 45 minutes. It might not hurt to trim the piece for later engagements.
Handel, though, is hopeless. When the lights went up on Schert and Drew Jacoby, he holding her extended arms, she toying with her balances and flashing dramatic extensions, one could not be faulted for believing that King was parodying his stylistic signatures. Drastically folded torsos and energetic, but meandering solos (like Credell's) gathered little tension and looked like audition numbers. Morgenthaler's lighting leads us to expect more than we eventually get.
What King is attempting here is a mood piece, but his musical ear is off (or at least a bit askew). He has ransacked the catalog of Handel's orchestral and chamber music and assembled a recorded, nine-part suite that must be the most lugubrious potpourri ever culled from this composer's extensive output. Whirring, electronic interludes by Leslie Stuck do not help. The sequence of largo and adagio movements (most of which do not end on closed cadences, because, in the printed scores, they lead directly into contrasting allegros) simply raise aural expectations and generate visual torpor. How, you wonder, could any choreographer neglect to exploit Handel's genius for exhilarating counterpoint? That quality, not surprisingly, rarely figures in King's movement scheme.
One up-tempo sequence late in the piece features the men'all in short, floppy skirts intended to show off their legs'promenading downstage from the back wall, finally erupting in a modest display of patterning. Here, for a few moments, Handel comes to life, and the movement suggests what the work might have been.
Alonzo King's LINES Ballet continues at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, San Francisco, through Sunday at 7 p.m. (415) 978-2787. www.linesballet.org.
