When dance master Alonzo King is asked about the inspiration behind his critically acclaimed choreography, he takes a long pause. When he finally begins to speak again, his words are rich with lyricism.
“I think it’s really about dedicating your life to work, and that the work that you dedicate your life to is a relationship,” says King, on the phone from his and his company’s home base of San Francisco. “In a relationship, you want to honour it by loyalty and commitment, and to the daily effort of that commitment to a living relationship by going deeper, by trying to find more gratitude for the opportunity, by trying to go into areas that you haven’t gone to before, by going to deeper excavations – I think that that, in itself, is inspiring.
“When we step into gratitude, something ignites within us, and we become larger, and we can do more,” he continues. “The two words that inspire me are ‘more’ and ‘better.’”
King is the founder and force behind Alonzo King LINES Ballet, an award-winning American contemporary ballet company that makes its return to our city this month as part of the 2017 Vancouver International Dance Festival (its first VIDF appearance was in 2012).
For its Vancouver performances, the company – which formed in 1982 and is now internationally renowned for its inventive collaborations with composers, musicians, and visual artists from around the world – will perform a double-bill of recent work: Shostakovich, in which King’s choreography is set against four string quartets by Soviet pianist and composer Dmitri Shostakovich; and Sand, a poignant work danced to music by Charles Lloyd and Jason Moran, which reminds audiences never to underestimate the power of a single entity, be it a grain of sand or an individual.
The company recently performed Shostakovichin Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia. King says Russian audiences “went crazy” for the work. “It’s a wonderful thing to be able to go all over the planet and share the work of our brilliant artists,” says King, who adds that audiences have an important role to play in his aforementioned living relationship with his art. “Audiences are communicators, and it’s interesting to learn and to be able to share.”
Although King speaks about his passion for the craft with profundity and poetry, he doesn’t expect audiences to come to the theatre with the same vocabulary. Just be open, and trust your gut. “When I go to a museum, I like to experience work the same way I meet people: I want to be open, so that means I have to drop pre-conceived notions of good, bad, beautiful, ugly, important, non-important, and I have to allow myself to feel, and to be receptive,” he says. “Intuition is what people need to bring. We have a lot of scrutiny, and we need to use it. The goal is to see behind appearances.”
Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet performs on Mar. 3 and 4 at the Vancouver Playhouse as part of the 2017 Vancouver International Dance Festival. Tickets $50/$60. VIDF runs Mar. 1-25 and features performances and workshops from local and international dance companies, including Dairakudan from Japan, Kitt Johnson from Denmark, Kaeja d’Dance from Toronto, and Vancouver companies Yayoi Theatre Movement and Kinesis Dance Somatheatro. Tickets and schedule at vidf.ca.
