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Getting to the root of ballet
Alonzo King's LINES Ballet
Alonzo King's LINES Ballet
When: 8 p.m. Saturday.
Admission: $19 to $40.
Where: Byham Theater, Downtown.
Details: 412-456-6666.
William Loeffler can be reached via e-mail or at 412-320-7986.
The Georgia-born choreographer, who founded Alonzo King's LINES Ballet in 1982 in San Francisco, has beguiled audiences and garnered critical huzzahs for the nervy inventiveness of his contemporary ballets.
The company makes its Pittsburgh debut Saturday, when it opens the 2005-06 Pittsburgh Dance Council season at the Byham. The co-presenter is the African-American Cultural Center.
King's choreography has been compared to Frankfurt Ballet's William Forsythe for the iconoclastic new vernacular it mines from the bedrock of European classical tradition.
But King, calling from San Francisco, insists that Europe gets too much credit for creating ballet.
"Somehow, people think that ballet sprung up in Europe, but that's a complete fallacy," he says. "Their definition of what ballet is and what it is not are two different things. Ballet is not a style. It's a science of movement.
"There are the 'white ballets' by (Marius) Petipa -- 'Swan Lake' and 'Giselle' and 'Sleeping Beauty.' But that's a style of ballet. Those are products from the science of movement that I prefer to call western classical dance. I think the term 'ballet' is a misnomer."
Ballet has African antecedents, he says. But there's a prevailing notion that it sprang more or less fully formed from Europe. Other dance forms, such as Flamenco, are acknowledged as a blend of different cultures -- in this case, gypsy, Jewish and Islamic traditions.
"No one does that with ballet," he says. "But believe me, it did not just pop up with Katherine de Medici in Europe. That's absurd to think that."
Indeed, when choosing music for his works, King often seems to look anywhere but Europe. His dance "People of the Forest" featured an appearance by African pygmies. "Three Stops on the Way Home" was a collaboration with saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders.
Saturday, they'll perform "Koto," a 35-minute ballet for 10 dancers, set to the music of master Koto player Miya Masaoka, and "Who Dressed You Like a Foreigner," a 1998 dance set to the music of tabla player Zakir Hussain.
King's soft-spoken, philosophical musings seem at odds with the nail-biting physicality of his ballets and his professional, get-it-done work ethic. In addition to sustaining his own company for more than 20 years, he also founded the San Francisco Dance Center in 1989. The six-studio, three-story facility has more than 2,000 adult students and has become a nexus of Northern California dance culture. King also created works for the Joffrey and Frankfurt Ballets as well as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Dance Theatre of Harlem.
"As a choreographer you are a builder, and a builder needs craft. You are taking like everyone who creates. You're seeing a blueprint in your mind, and you have to re-create that in the physical world. It's carpentry, really."
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