Alonzo King LINES Ballet
Yerba Buena Center for the ArtsSan Francisco, CA
October 23, 2009
by Rita Felciano
Copyright © Rita Felciano, 2009
Being time-based arts, it seems fair to expect some kind of trajectory when music and dance cooperate on stage. It doesn’t have to be linear with a beginning, middle and end though the piece should move somewhere. But I have given up to look for that in the works of Alonzo King. What he creates, I think, is a sense of suspended time, perhaps something akin to the eternal presence. In his own and for his dancers imagination, he uses a pointillist painter’s palette who puts his canvasses together from hundreds of individual dots. Together they create the shimmering work of art.
Often there doesn’t seem to be a clear reason why King’s pieces begin and end the way they do. They are assembled in units, identified by Roman numerals and the dancers that are showcased in them. The system, however, is very fluid; sections flow in and out of each other. Rarely do you get a sense of this being the end of work.
At King’s most recent, brilliantly performed concert I kept thinking of William Random Hearst who in another mad folly of acquisition had bought himself a Spanish Romanesque chapel. He had it dismantled and the individual parts shipped in properly numbered the boxes to San Francisco where, waiting their final destination, they were stored in Golden Gate Park. One night a fire broke out and the containers burned. For years, the fragments gathered moss behind deYoung Museum. You could still clearly see that it was a chapel though nobody knew how to put it back together. (In the seventies, the stones were finally shipped to some monastery in Northern California hopefully to be given new life.)
One of the highlights of LINES concerts during the last half dozen years has been King’s working with extraordinary musicians—Moroccan, Middle Eastern, Indian. While there rarely seems to be a direct connection between music and dance—except when Meredith Webster is set afire by what emanates from the pit—these strong musical environments create a vibrating canvass for King’s dancers. For “Refraction,” King worked with a gifted twenty-first century jazz musician, New York-based Jason Moran. In his scores he draws on European art song, baroque music, stride, pop and blues the way an organist might pull the stops on his instruments. Moran create a “world music” of his own. Played live, with bass player Tarus Mareen and drummer Nasheet Waits, Moran’s commissioned score was a find.The dancers responded with great alacrity. Did “Refraction’s” eleven sections accumulate into a coherent whole? Structurally, I don’t think so. But the intensity of the individual moments--that sense of total presence--created an emotional momentum that was most satisfying.
Brett Conway, the company’s magnetic powerhouse who seems to spend a lot of time at the gym these days, wandered through the work, both participant and distant observer. Notes of discord couldn’t be missed when David Harvey, only in his second season but already a fiercely focused performer, tenderly caressed and then yanked Caroline Rocher’s ponytail. She later tore into a duet between Corey Scott-Gilbert and Ricardo Zayas. Was she breaking up a fight? Zayas’ huge hops in parallel position and running turns looked like a Faun gone wild, Scott-Gilbert, the man with the lyrically torso, sank into wide plies as if into a volcano’s crater only to rise like its cone.
King is not particularly known for his sense of humor. But a quartet had Laurel Keen and Webster shepherd Scott Gilbert and Zayas Nanny-like through their paces. A few minutes later the men returned the favor. Later on the guys did their own thing center stage while the women lined on the sidelines to whip off furious pirouettes.One of “Refraction’s” most dramatic sections came with a hugely danced duet for Keen and Harvey. She offered him her hand but put her own head into it, she stepped and sat on him like Rodin’s “The Thinker”. The episode ended on a bluesy note as she folded herself over him; he never let her fall; she ended alone, balanced on her toes, but barely so.
The reprise of the much traveled 2005 “The Moroccan Project”—shortened of its instrumental overture and three sections towards the end—has lost none of its sense of mystery though it is evoked as much by what is probably King’s most substantial set than by its choreography. Two floor to ceiling curtain hang stage right. An upstage left curved wall suggests both protection and confinement. Its bricks are stacked loosely enough for people to peek out but not in. I kept thinking of the elegantly carved stone screens in Arab homes that let breezes enter yet provide privacy.“Moroccan” suggests communal, though not necessarily comfortable intimacy, with dancers watching each other—often from the shadows. At one point Rocher gently retreated into the dark only to shoot out again to assert herself against her male colleagues. Here the relationship between music is among the strongest of King’s works. Zayas fiercely folded, curled and split his limbs to the female singers exuberant ululating. Webster whipped herself into—a very controlled frenzy—to a male blessing song. A lovely trio for Rocher, Keen and Webster, to an oud solo, showed femininity that is soft but resilient. A duet—to rhythmically intricate handclapping—rose to a fierce, yet never aggressive competition between Keen and Webster. Perhaps most emotionally wrenching was Scott-Gilbert’s powerful lament to ‘Hebrew Song for Peace’. The dancer’s response to the music elicited contracting and twisting limbs and muscles from a gorgeously expressive body. Here Scott-Gilbert walked tall and not because of his height.