Alonzo King grew up in Albany, Georgia, and in the home of his parents he experienced the presence of such civil rights leaders as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and singer Lena Horne. His mother and father founded The Albany Movement, a community-wide program of resistance to the strictures of post-Civil War Black suppression. Both were committed to perceiving and telling the truth. She loved to dance, and his father exposed him to art.
At 21, Alonzo King and his friend Robert Rosenwasser founded Lines Ballet, which “disavows the notion of ballet as something romantic or arbitrary in nature” and “sees it rather as a science, with a set of concepts based on universal principles that do not vary.” These “align with western physics as well as eastern conception of energy flow.”
King says, “Ballet is a core of ideas and the manipulation of energy to express those ideas.” He urges his dancers to reach deep into their bodies to find their own muscular and spiritual energies and inspirations, “rather than reconceiving the dynamic assumptions to which the form has been historically attached.”
Where ballet has traditionally been associated with the qualities of complaisance, that is, with the ideals of Versailles, emphasizing grace, decorativeness, and lyricism, King has thrust the form directly into the present. Its hyper-driven speed and propulsion seem at ease in the digital world, as does the aggressiveness of its rhythmic attack. King’s choreography muscles its way through space with an insistent physicality that celebrates flesh and blood, point up the quaintness of traditional balletic languor as a relic of days when women were idealized as immaterial. King’s equalizing of gender roles and of male and female techniques hustles ballet into the postfeminist world.
“It celebrates the gains to be made in risk-taking and rule-breaking: transposing and inverting bodily slaps, folding lines in on themselves, activating a fluid spine. His work celebrates daring, energy, freedom and forcefulness, rejecting dancing that is “correct” for dancing that is impulsive. The only thing it reveres is pushing into the unknown.” (Pillow Talks by Judy Tyre and Suzanne Carbonneau, 2022)
In this brief video, Alonzo King summarizes his dance teaching philosophy, which emphasizes each individual’s discovery, improvement, and expression of deep bodily perceptions and understanding. Judy Tyre, the Pillow Scholar in Residence who was a member of his Lines company, told the audience at her pre-performance Pillow Talk that this informs his choice of dancers.
‘Four Heart Testaments’
The first half of the program was comprised of four affecting excerpts of Alonzo King’s dances—Grace (2020), Writing Ground (2010), The Radius of Convergence (2008), and Rasa (2008)—that address the personal delights and challenges of intimacy and love and bring forth both his artistic vision and his performers’ virtuosity.
Grace is set to this heavenly performance of the Pie Jesu movement of Gabriel Faure’s Requiem by Lucia Popp and the Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Sir Colin Davis. Dancers Adji Cissoko, Ilaria Guerra, and Michael Montgomery glided and engaged with astounding fluidity and, together with the beautifully projected music, ceremonial grandeur.
In Writing Ground, soprano Kathleen Battle sings the spiritual Over My Head I Hear Music, as dancer Madeline DeVries, wearing a diaphanous silken gown, traversed the stage, dramatically turning and spinning her long hair, arching her back as she windmilled her arms, capturing the phrasing with exquisitely balanced extensions both upward and settling down. She exited quietly to stage left to several moments of reverie in the audience, followed by tumultuous applause.
In The Radius of Convergence, the music of composer and contrabass virtuouso Edgar Meyer and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders framed an ensemble of five male dancers. In a dramatic moment, one dancer jumps into the arms of the four in the rear. They catch and then push him away and he in turn pushes them back. Suddenly, in silence, the four men exit, followed sadly by the other. Such powerful gestures of synchrony, receiving and rejecting, appear to enact male solidarity, support, rejection and suffering. Michael Montgomery and James Gowan alternate in the role of the front dancer in different performances. The four dancers in the rear are Lorris Eichinger, Shuaib Elhassan, Alvara Montelongo and Joshua Francique.
The tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain composed this shimmering Rasa featuring Indian percussion and the classical Indian violin master Kala Ramnath. Soprano and tenor voices create a hypnotic intensity even as powerfully propulsive rhythms energize the bodies of dancers Michael Montgomery, Lorris Eichinger, Shuaib Elhassan, and Alvaro Montelongo.
In this video of an earlier performance, we perceive the extraordinary intimacy between male and female dancers who almost never separate. Balancing together miraculously in sinuous – but not necessarily sexualized contact until the very end when, seemingly fearful, they break apart – they both forcefully and delicately apply themselves to one another and lift, twist, twirl, and touch with stirring intensity
‘Azoth’
In Azoth the jazz and classical piano virtuoso Jason Moran and the celebrated saxophonist, clarinetist, and flutist Charles Lloyd provide a deliciously evocative and often swinging background to an imaginary amalgam of the physics and catalytics of the creation of gold.
As one can see in this video excerpt of an earlier performance in France in June 2021, dancers in both rectangular and linear formations perform for one another and join in assemblages of extended duets that branch across the stage. The lighting is dramatic, often provided by rectangular grids of multiple rows of bulbs that hang at the rear and on the wings of the stage, which change color from white to grey and ultimately to gold.
Toward the end of the dance, when the stage is fully darkened, individual dancers hold small versions of the grids and illuminate the focal dancers with them, creating moving images of light and shadow. One provocative evocation of the molecular transformation of metal involves a performer’s conducting a purposive mobile CT scan by pressing a grid on either side of a kneeling colleague’s head.
After many sequences of sweeping groupings, set to improvised riffs over formal chord progressions, which include both bluesy tonalities and a magical boogie-woogie in which Moran sustains a wildly repeated ostinato between notes at the lowest and highest ends of the keyboard, Adji Cissoko in flowing gold and Michael Montgomery in plain brown shorts curl around each other in a long, sometimes edgy, sometimes romantic pas-de-deux seemingly exploring the many ways two human elements can intertwine and relate to each other.
If lead, mercury, radiation, and magic can unite in choreography, it is ultimately evident that love is the source of gold.
