King looking forward as his troupe begins 40th season
Lines Ballet marks the milestone with a world premiere in San Francisco
Taking a victory lap is not in Alonzo King's nature.
It's not humility or bashfulness that keeps him from basking in the limelight. Rather, the San Francisco choreographer doesn't stay still long enough for laurels to gather on his imposing dome. But as his company Lines Ballet gears up for its 40th season King can't avoid taking stock of what has turned into a banner year.
More than a milestone, the anniversary arrives as something of a coronation for King as his work circles the globe with and without his dancers. The fact that Lines received an unprecedented $5 million donation from MacKenzie Scott and Dan Jewett last year means the company has attained enviable stability, which is to say that King's cup runneth over, and he's enjoying every drop.
“I feel really fortunate, and I don't want to sound grandiose, but it's kind of an amazing, wonderful life,” he said. “It's been a full engaged career. We've never stopped making and doing.”
Lines Ballet opens its 40th season at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco FridayMay 22 with eight performances of a world premiere collaboration with Grammy Award-winning vocalist Lisa Fischer performing a score commissioned from pianist Jason Moran. The artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center, Moran is among jazz's most celebrated and visible artists and he's become something of an in-house muse for King, with eight previous collaborations since 2009.
Fischer, who won a Grammy Award with her 1991 debut album, “How Can I Ease the Pain,” was enjoying newfound fame via her featured role in the Academy Award-winning documentary “Twenty Feet from Stardom” when she last worked with King on 2015's “The Propelled Heart,” a 16-section ballet that's become a mainstay of the Lines repertoire.
For King, Fischer and Moran aren't just extraordinary artists, they're “people who are like-minded in my belief about movement and sound,” he said. “Dancing and music are the same thing. A dancer is a musician. A musician is a dancer. We come together as partners in a soul language, going directly to the mind and the heart.”
King's musical vision has taken flight in 2022, as Lines has performed in Austria, Serbia, Italy, Spain and France. London-based Ballet Rambert is performing King's “Following the Subtle Current Upstream” across the U.K. this spring, and his work for San Francisco Ballet, “The Collective Agreement,” is part of the National. Ballet of Canada's fall season in Toronto.
Perhaps most gratifying is the realization of a long talked about collaboration with American Ballet Theatre. Artistic director of ABT since 1992, Kevin McKenzie has been trying to make a King commission work for decades, and in his last season it has come to pass. “Single Eye” premiered in March at Costa Mesa's Segerstrom Center for the Arts, and is part of ABT's summer season at the Metropolitan Opera.
In commissioning “Single Eye,” which takes its title from the Gospel of Matthew (“If thine eye be single, the whole body shall be full of light”), McKenzie had an opportunity to watch King work with ABT dancers up close. Setting the ballet on the ABT dancers, King “zoned in on the very people who could take responsibility for his work, as opposed to try to please him and show him what they think he wants to see,” McKenzie said.
“It's a very kinetic process and when something wasn't working with one of the couples I could see they were trying to make it smooth and perfect. A dancer asked, `What is what you want here?' Alonzo said, `It doesn't matter what I want. It's your ballet.' It's a work where dancers have more leeway than usual, and it was a wonderfully organic evolution of a work done in a very different process that we usually do.”
King is also coming to screens big and small this year. Award-winning filmmaker Drea Cooper's documentary about Lines Ballet, “Origins,” is slated to premiere, as is a new film choreographed by King featuring ballet superstar Misty Copeland and Lines dancer Babatunji Johnson. The company will be back at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the fall for the world premiere of a ballet inspired by the Arctic and a reprise of “Rasa” featuring tabla master Zakir Hussain. Is King taking on too much?
“There are times when it's explosive and we have to say no to a lot of interesting things,” King said. “We've always had to. The demand is so constant, but the magnanimity of saying yes can be hard to resist. This is how I give and contribute to the world, this miraculous life with these amazing artists.”