Vocals complement Lines’ physicality
There’s enough dancing in Lines Ballet’s “The Propelled Heart,” seen at the Wednesday, Nov. 15, opening at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, to fill the better part of a season for many companies. Dynamically performed by an ensemble of 10, the piece is a sustained 16-part showcase of commanding prowess, undulant grace, kinetic angularity and limb-flexing elasticity that time and again seems to impel the dancers’ bodies toward some physically unattainable dimension.
It’s all a wonder of simultaneous mastery and aspiration to witness, whether in a floorbound ensemble piece that transforms the company into what appears to be a swarm of water-striding insects, a series of clingingly intertwined pas de deux, feverish solos or elaborate daisy chains. For 90 minutes (including intermission), in Alonzo King’s choreography, the company is in near perpetual motion. Even when all or most of the dancers go still from time to time, they seem to be marshaling themselves for some new eruption.
Yet for all the surging physicality of this “Heart,” which premiered in 2015, it’s vocalist Lisa Fischer who forms the
work’s center of gravity. A former Rolling Stones backup singer profiled in the documentary “20 Feet From Stardom,” Fischer is onstage for most of the night, lofting everything from her own and collaborator JC Maillard’s swooping nonverbal melodies to Eugene McDaniels’ aching “If I Lose” to Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday.” “How Can I Ease the Pain,” by Fischer and Narada Michael Walden, is especially wrenching.
It seems perfectly fitting when the dancers cozy up to her for comfort or chime in to sing a choral echo of some phrase she’s just sent soaring. Fischer is a mood maker, by turns seraphic, sultry and grave, as she meanders the stage in a floor-length dress like a self-assured muse, two reverberant microphones in hand.
It’s that very capacity to define the emotional terms that both complicates and confounds some of the dancing. The musical presence of the evening, which includes a fair amount of pulsing and pervasive electronica, is so dominant that even the most potent dancing sometimes seems to travel in its wake rather than being buoyed up and carried along in consort with it. That’s especially true when the stage is busy with multiple activities, the dancers’ churning and whirling away in what becomes a blur of undifferentiated momentum. It’s consistently impressive but not always involving.
Gradually, King begins to give his dancers moments to shine on their own. In one indelible passage, Babatunji ends his space-carving solo with desperate, yearning leaps. Arms flapping as he lets out strangled sounding yawps, he’s an Icarus wannabe, determined and doomed in his attempt to fly. It’s both heartbreaking and soul restoring when he approaches Fischer for consolation. Yujin Kim has a standout moment in the second act, in a gorgeously shaped solo that marries vulnerability and authority.
Alone and in ensembles, the dancers look their best in the clean lines and autumnal palette of Robert Rosenwasser’s costumes, varied here and there with a shimmer of silver or gold. Axel Morgenthaler’s mutable lighting is ideal.
King introduced the company’s new CEO, Muriel Maffre, at the top of Wednesday’s opening night. Maffre’s remarks about the Lines company’s “empathy, diversity and imagination” were right on point. All three values are amply apparent in “The Propelled Heart.” It’s not just the ethnic composition or contrasting body types that stake out such a wide range. Whether the dancers are sprinting across the stage, coiled inward or extended out in all directions — the women’s leg lifts are almost impossibly lofty — a sense of utter conviction prevails.
“The Propelled Heart” rides first and finally on the imagination, in Maffre’s word, of what the body can do.