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(Dance Review) Alonzo King's LINES Ballet
7.13.05
JACOB'S PILLOW DANCE
Becket, Mass.
Alonzo King's LINES Ballet
Ted Shawn Theatre
July 13-17, 2005
Before the Blues (2004)
Who Dressed You Like a Foreigner? (1998)
The two-part program by Alonzo King's LINES Ballet running through this weekend on the main stage at Jacob's Pillow is a terrific showcase for one of the premier modern ballet companies, one which, while still firmly rooted in the tradition of ballet, is not afraid to push the form to its limit.
That's not to say that King doesn't push. The first dance, Before the Blues, was a full-fledged multimedia production, with video, lighting, and a broad range of music and sound, including moans, grunts, and narration by Danny Glover.
The piece opens with a spiritual-type melody played by Pharoah Sanders on saxophone while the video screen shows a warm river at sunset. The spiritual quotes "The Star Spangled Banner" several times, and the image suggests a phantom slave ship, either landing on the coast of Africa to take people away, or landing on the Southern coast to deliver its cargo.
Two barechested men come out in skirts and duet, establishing once and for all the company's approach, solidly rooted in ballet, where movements and gestures are fluid and supple, and bodies, no matter how far they twist or bend, always snap back to a balanced state, as if the spines are suspended by a string.
The dance consists of over a dozen short vignettes that seem to take the dancegoer through something of a history of African-American life. Much of the soundtrack consists of jazz by Sanders and vocal works, like original field hollers and work songs, or reconstructions of such, including traditional African melodies, by members of Sweet Honey in the Rock.
Who Dressed You Like a Foreigner? is perhaps more straightforward. Comprised of a half-dozen scenarios, the piece is powered by Zakir Hussain's virtuoso tabla rhythms with occasional vocal interpolations. What works so amazingly well about this piece is the contract between the somewhat traditional dancing and Hussain's unlikely music, so clearly infectious and rhythmic yet so NOT what one expects to hear powering a dance.
In sticking so closely to balletic tradition in this number, yet juxtaposing it with the unlikely music, King effectively plays with preconceptions and notions of ballet, and standard balletic vocabulary suddenly becomes commentary upon itself, turned inside out so that the familiar appears exotic.
It's almost magical, and by the end, the audience responded with awe to King's magic.
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