March 13, 2001 Summary Facts:
San Francisco-based LINES Contemporary Ballet returns to Santa Barbara for the first time since its last visit in 1996 for two performances on Tuesday and Wednesday, April 17 and 18 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. The company will perform The Heart’s Natural Inclination, a new work that premiered at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center in February, and Who Dressed You Like a Foreigner? with commissioned music by classical Indian musician and tabla master Zakir Hussain. The audience at Tuesday’s show is invited to stay after the performance for a Meet-the-Artist Discussion with Alonzo King. LINES, which features some the West Coast’s most skillful and virtuosic dancers, blends rigorous ballet technique and precision with modern dance idioms and an original movement vocabulary. King and his dancers have been widely hailed for their distinctive style and prowess, which the Los Angeles Times calls “the most sophisticated modernism in classical dance.” The New York Times notes that “As a choreographer rooted in ballet who uses modern-dance idioms rather than the other way around, King knows how to exploit classical technique to the maximum. Every arabesque is struck with muscular tension, not exhibited for noble line. This makes for choreography of pull-and-stretch dynamics: tension that is exciting to watch.” Dance Magazine describes King’s work graphically, appreciating the vigor inherent in his choreography: Women hover on pointe, whack their legs from arabesque to six o’clock high in front, pitch into large, swooping leg circles, then fly into a frenzy of angular gestural semaphore. Men turn in second, perched on half-toe, then snap to back attitude, balance, whip off a double pirouette, then leap, with splayed limbs. The action is nonstop, aggressively muscular and all done at a manic pace. Vigorous distortions of classic ballet poses take precedence: turned-in extensions, crooked elbows, hunched spines. ...King’s dancers take on his taxing movement with fierce technique and loads of energy. Their sheer force and speed occasionally elicit bursts of applause, even from blasé New Yorkers. LINES’ Santa Barbara programs will open with open with The Heart’s Natural Inclination with commissioned music by Leslie Stuck who has worked as a musical collaborator with William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, New York City Ballet and David Parsons Dance. This new work in six parts highlights the men of the company who have been called “the strongest male line-up of any company in Northern California, (for whom) a ballet background has strengthened the line, elevated the center, enhanced the allure and upped the risk-taking.” Who Dressed You Like a Foreigner? will follow. A popular work that premiered in September 1998 at Yerba Buena Center, it features a score for voice and percussion composed and performed by tabla master musician Zakir Hussain. A ballet in several segments, it features King’s trademark extremes of extension and flexion. The dance culminates with an intimate pas de deux, “MA” that The Oakland Tribune claims “transcends the stage and comes as close to ecstasy as dance gets.” Raised in Santa Barbara, Alonzo King studied dance on scholarship at George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet and began his career as a dancer with Dance Theater of Harlem and the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company. King founded LINES in 1982, he explains, because “I couldn’t find any one company that combined all I liked in dance, so I decided to start my own.” As a choreographer, he has been commissioned to create and stage ballets for the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, Dance Theater of Harlem, Frankfurt Ballet, Hong Kong Ballet, prima ballerina Natalia Makarova and others. More information about LINES can be found at www.linesballet.org. As part of their residency at UCSB, Alonzo King and members of LINES Contemporary Ballet will conduct a public master class on Monday, April 16 from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Carrillo Recreation Center. Admission to the class is $15. For information and to register for the class, call the Santa Barbara Dance Alliance at 966-6950. Presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, this residency is sponsored by KEYT-TV 3 and the Santa Barbara Dance Alliance. This tour by LINES Contemporary Ballet is supported in part with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the California Arts Council, a state agency. For tickets or more information, Editor: For photos, please call |