Alonzo King's LINES Ballet.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco, California October 16, 2002

Though he was entitled to present a retrospective at his twentieth-anniversary concert, Alonzo King instead emphasized the present and future of his twelve-member ballet company. Five of the dancers are in their first season, and Corinne Larsen is back after a four-year hiatus. (The five newcomers--Brett Conway, Prince Credell, Drew Jacoby, Laurel Keen, and Tanya Wideman-Davis--impressed with the individuality of their performance personalities. Credell, a stocky, compact dancer with screwed-to-the-floor turns, and Keen, with lovely lyrical lines, made particularly strong first impressions.) The program also featured two guest artists. Rasta Thomas integrated himself beautifully into the ensemble and danced two respectable solos. Bay Area flamenco dancer La Tania was almost overshadowed by her cantaor, the impeccable Jesus Montoya.

For this celebratory event, King choreographed a dozen mostly small-scaled dances and grouped them together like a flock of birds sitting on a telephone line. It was not an altogether felicitous decision. Too many of the dances--all of them unnamed--began to look alike, despite the fact that costumes (designed by Robert Rosenwasser, Sandra Woodall, and Cari Borja) and lighting design (by the brilliant Axel Morgenthaler) injected dramatic flair and variety. More extensive ensemble work, something which King has just barely started to explore, might have helped.

The musical choices, which ranged from live (by the splendid Pharoah Sanders and the lesser William Henderson) to original electronic (Miguel Frasconi and Les Stuck) and recorded (Hildegard Von Bingen and Bach), seemed like afterthoughts, sometimes overlapping from one piece of choreography to the next without much of an internal logic.

Still, King's hypergestural approach to ballet, his embrace of extreme off-center balances, the struggle (and embrace of the struggle) for equilibrium, and ongoing fracturing of balletic line have justifiably made him one of ballet's more original thinkers. HIS DANCES, AT TIMES ALMOST VIOLENT ON THE OUTSIDE, ARISE FROM A CORE OF PERFECT STILLNESS; IT'S AN ALMOST IRRESISTIBLE DYNAMIC.

The men in this concert--except for a trio that focused on male individuality--served in ballet's traditional roles. They acted as enablers, stabilizing their partners in those skewed balances, supporting their angular thrusts and following them into knotted limb combinations. Artur Sultanov was an excellent prince, stepping modestly into the background for the regal Jacoby's spatial explorations and tendering his hand to Keen as if she were Aurora. In one of King's most expressively dense trios, Maurya Kerr gave what was probably her best performance yet. An image of trembling fragility on the verge of collapse as Conway and Credell rearranged her arm positions and manipulated her legs through limping walks, she emerged triumphant, still precariously balanced but with exceptional dignity, her tensile strength intact.

The program made one bow to the past with an excerpt from the 1994 Ocean. A seemingly endless line of dancers worked its way downstage, arms to the sky, then dropped and crawled, only to rise again into a sea of darkness. In the middle of this cycle of generation and decay, Kerr and Conway emerged in an egalitarian duet. They pulled apart, shoving each other away only to come together into a limb-entwined unity, ending in a two-legged hop to which each dancer contributed one leg.

Besides new work, the evening presented another first. LINES dancers tend to focus inward and rarely look at the audience. But here the lights went down on Gregory Dawson, the company's senior dancer. His arms outstretched, he was grinning from ear to ear. And who could blame him?