30 years of Alonzo King's challenge to dancers
Keelan Whitmore in a costume by Robert Rosenwasser, Photo: RJ Muna, courtesy Lines
“If you are vulnerable, honest, and respond like a tuning fork, then we are kin. I surrender, and I see you. It’s quickly obvious who will take their ‘clothes’ off,” Alonzo King answers a UC Irvine student’s question on what he looks for in a dancer. The occasion was a Q&A last fall after a preview showing of a work that King was choreographing for the combined forces of Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. The yet unnamed piece will receive its world premiere on February 1 and 2 at Cal Performances.
For King, whose company celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, telling dancers to take their clothes off—he also talks about “peeling the layers of the onion”—is a way of asking them to strip themselves of what he calls “false identities.” “I want to see you, not your race, gender, technique, or occupation,” he tells them.
In his 30-year career King has made 95 dances for his own group and more than two dozen commissioned ones for other companies, including the Royal Swedish Ballet, Hong Kong Ballet, Ballett Frankfurt, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. As an African-American artistic director of a one-choreographer ballet company with a multiracial ensemble, King occupies a singular position in American dance. As a thinker about ballet in terms of a multifaceted, scientific language and dance as something akin to meditative practice, he is unique.
Asked what he has learned during the last three decades, he doesn’t hesitate: “I learned more that things have to proceed from the inside out. I knew that early; and that I was interested in what was behind appearances, not how it looked, but its manner of operation.”
Alonzo King, Photo: RJ Muna, Courtesy Lines
When he was 8 or 10, while accompanying his father (Slater King, a civil rights leader) on a business trip to New York, Alonzo saw his first ballet. “Afterwards,” says King, “he asked me how I had liked it. I was enraptured and told him that the dancer in the front didn’t have it, but another farther back really did. I also told him what didn’t work and how it could be improved. He just looked at me and said that I really was something.”
But did he really know and why did he, even at that age? “Yes,” King affirms. “Inside I did know. I think I did know because I love dancers. I always had that. At the bottom line, I like to see good dancing.”
Now he sees good dancing every day. The 12 members of his troupe are exquisite artists and they often rehearse more than one project at a time.
Caroline Rocher has been a company member since 2007. Fearless yet elegant with a silken authority to her phrasing, she was a “25 to Watch” in 2001. “Alonzo makes you work more with ideas than steps,” says Rocher. “You have to find the intention behind the steps; that was very different for me,” she recalls. Trained in France and at The Ailey School, Rocher performed with both American (Dance Theatre of Harlem) and European companies (Lyon Opera and Bavarian State Ballet). Encountering King’s work at DTH, she was intrigued enough to think about joining LINES one day. “I was 30, and I was looking for a change,” she says. “I wanted to work in a more intimate environment, to have a more one-to-one relationship with a choreographer.”
Though becoming a LINES dancer has been “deeply satisfying,” it has not always been easy. King’s method is to ask the dancers to dig a movement’s impetus out of themselves and then to stretch/pull/yank it to the extreme of where it can go. “I really, really wanted to be there,” Rocher remembers, but “Alonzo’s ideas often are difficult, so you just have to keep trying. Now, I feel more comfortable with his way of working, though I still have a long way to go.”
Pushing dancers towards becoming more themselves, both as artists and as human beings, is one of King’s great gifts to the art. It’s also what Glenn Edgerton, artistic director of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, saw in King when, rather serendipitously, he watched him rehearse LINES in 2009. “We were doing a summer intensive [in San Francisco] in the studio next to him, and he invited me in,” Edgerton recalls. “Though I had known his choreography for years, I was enthralled with the way he was working. He inspired the dancers to want to go further, to investigate more deeply the many different levels that movement can take you.” Edgerton wanted his dancers in Chicago to have that same experience even though he knew that their companies were quite different. “His dancers are more elongated and neoclassical while mine are more grounded.”
After King set his 2000 Ailey commission Following the Subtle Current Upstream on Hubbard in 2011, the two men started to talk about a possible collaboration. Edgerton wanted every one of his 18 dancers involved. King, who choreographs chains of small group sequences that flow into each other, had his doubts. He remembers telling Edgerton, “But that’s not who I am.” At the same time, however, he was intrigued by the challenge. “I said to myself, if you have the opportunity to be uncomfortable—which is what I always tell my dancers—take it.”
In September after three weeks of working in California, the two troupes clearly had found a common ground, a common impulse for movement. The result at Irvine, unfinished as it was, showed King as having challenged himself to move larger groups onstage—without losing the complexity of the more intimate choreography that he values so highly.
When choreographing for his own dancers, King has always reached far and wide for his musical choices. His company has performed to jazz (Jason Moran, Pharoah Sanders, Coleman Hawkins), world music (Zakir Hussain, Astor Piazzolla, Mickey Hart, El Hamideen, Russian liturgical chants), and European classical scores, both contemporary and historical. King’s diverse view of ballet is popular in Europe, where he tours annually, most recently last November on a month-long engagement to 11 cities.
Caroline Rocher in Scheherazade, Photo: RJ Muna, Courtesy Lines
In terms of design, Robert Rosenwasser (costumes, light) and Axel Morgenthaler (light) have given LINES its distinct look of luminosity and tensile strength. Substantial physical sets, perhaps for financial reasons, have been relatively rare.
But two years ago King took the plunge and commissioned local architect Christopher Haas to create two sets for Triangle of the Squinches. Though monumental in size, the pieces are also portable enough—one is made of rubberized strings, the other of layered cardboard—for a company that tours 14 to 17 weeks per year. Perhaps most noteworthy was King’s decision to have his dancers interact with the two sculptures, suggesting a dynamic relationship between inert material and the human body.
“Where does the idea come from that objects are inanimate?” King asks. “When a primitive holds a talisman, that is real to him. We know from science that everything is just different vibrations. Skyscrapers, igloos, teepees, a hill in a landscape have vibrations. It’s always a pas de deux with the aim to become one. Take a light bulb. It becomes what it is because of the energy that goes into it.”
The light bulb King refers to plays a major role in his most recent creation, Constellation, premiered last fall at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Inspired by Jim Campbell’s “Exploded View,” an installation at SFMOMA, King asked Campbell to design a set—from light bulbs. The dancers performed against and through a curtain of globes and used some as playful accoutrements on their bodies.
Looking forward to rehearsing his dancers in this latest piece and thinking back on the last three decades, King says he is full of gratitude to all the artists he has worked with. He might be thinking about the Baaka Nzamba Lela people from Cameroon (with whom he worked in 2001) or the Shaolin monks from China (with whom he collaborated in 2007). Or he might be thinking of all the extraordinary dancers who have passed through LINES and have been changed by their work together, like Drew Jacoby (now dancing with Nederlands Dans Theater), John Michael Schert (with Trey McIntyre Project), and Prince Credell (with Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève). The stream of new dancers has allowed him, as he says, to keep renewing himself.
Rita Felciano is the critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and also writes for www.danceviewtimes.com.
Joanna Haigood finds inspiration in African American history.
Matthew Wickett and Raissa Simpson in Haigood’s The Monkey and the Devil. Photo by Walter Kitundu, Courtesy Zaccho.
To mark Black History Month, we decided to focus on a choreographer who has been inspired by the history of African Americans: the extraordinary Joanna Haigood. Known for her daring and provocative site-specific works, she has followed her interest in the heritage that she unearthed during some of those projects. Haigood also teaches in the Bay area and directs a youth company in aerial work.
Hunched over with knees to their chins, four male dancers precariously balance themselves on top of a stick house that looks as if a child had drawn it. They align their bodies with the structure’s roof, its color matching that of jumpsuits for the 718 prisoners on California’s death row—the most of any state in the nation. The dancers, members of San Francisco’s Zaccho Dance Theatre, couldn’t be more different from each other. Byb Chanel Bibene incorporates traditions from his native Republic of the Congo into a contemporary style; Fawole is a modern dancer working towards a Ph.D.; Travis Rowland was a competitive gymnast; and Michael Velez teaches a fusion of modern and funk at LINES BFA. But slowly, as the men unfold their torsos and reach for each others’ arms, they develop a common bond.
Dying is but the latest of Haigood’s explorations into African American history. The process started in the mid-90s in preparation for her magnificent Invisible Wings, the site-specific work that was inspired by Jacob’s Pillow’s history as a stop on the Underground Railroad. (A beautiful dancer with a poetic presence, Haigood herself gave a haunting performance in this epic piece.)
Dying just may be the most emotionally disturbing piece Haigood has created yet. “I have to restrict myself,” she says during a break. “The material is so devastating.”
The first rehearsal of Dying didn’t quite turn out as planned. Haigood asked the dancers about their personal experiences with the penal system. One of them had been unjustly arrested and badly treated in jail. Another had an older brother in and out of prison. Then Haigood showed a documentary on the death penalty’s impact—including on those charged with carrying it out. At the end of the presentation, everyone was so emotionally drained that Haigood just offered the dancers tea and sent them home.
Yet a week later the men were fully engaged in giving the distressing material choreographic shape. The process is a collaborative one. “Joanna gives us suggestions and images and we work out the details,” says Rowland. “She refines what we do and makes the final decision.”
Yet Dying also shines with a weird beauty when the quartet engages in a stately roundelay. They take turns engaging in some kind of communal ritual in this confined space that is both home and cage.
For much of her career, Haigood’s tributes to those who have gone before us—whether they be soldiers, factory laborers, or dockworkers—have involved physical locations. Every one of these works started with trying to get a sense of place, to find residue that clings to walls or the faded footprints from people long dead. Haigood calls the process “creating a window between the present and the past, where memory and imagination meet.” In one form or another, she brings these spaces back to life.
Rowland joined Zaccho in 2008 as part of Sailing Away, in which Haigood examined a little-known historical fact. In the 19th century, Market Street, San Francisco’s main thoroughfare, was home to a burgeoning black middle class. Yet in 1858, because of increasing discrimination, some 800 of them sailed for British Columbia.
“Her investigative process is so intelligent and so intense,” Rowland says about working with Haigood. For Sailing she took the dancers to First Street, which had been the edge of the Bay where the emigrants would have embarked. Haigood’s choreography also has a quiet authority that allows Rowland, who is physically very strong, “to more fully use my whole body and develop a character.” In Sailing, which was actually performed on Market Street in authentic Victorian dress, he portrayed a shoe store owner who traveled with his teenage daughter. Keeping what Rowland calls a “meditative” focus while walking down the street amidst camera-toting tourists wasn’t easy. He recalled one tourist taunting him with “Isn’t it a pity what you people have allowed to happen to yourselves.” But he also remembers an African American man gently putting an arm around his shoulder and walking with him for a while.
For Departure and Arrival, commissioned by the 2007 San Francisco International Arts Festival, Haigood looked at the San Francisco International Airport’s segmented roof. It reminded her of ships’ hulls. So she built, with designer Ricardo Rivera, a huge panel with documentary slides recounting the Middle Passage (the ocean crossings that took Africans to the New World to be slaves from the 15th to the 19th centuries) inside the terminal. Next to it on a platform, weary travelers expressed their identity in both African and contemporary choreography while Haigood herself floated in from above. Suspended stick houses—one of them found its way into Dying—suggested dreams for a home in the Diaspora.
In Monkey and the Devil she went head on with racism. Performed in a one-room house designed by Charles Trapolin, cut into two equally unstable halves placed inside YBCA’s Forum, Monkey drew for its gut-wrenching impact on almost balletic formality. Two couples—one white, one black—tried to destroy each other and themselves in mirrored synchronicity.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that her search into the African American struggle would lead her to W. E .B. Du Bois, the early 20th-century thinker who helped lay the foundation for the civil rights movement. Haigood is currently mining his writings for a new piece to be shown this month as a work in progress at ODC Theater. She is drawn to Du Bois’ idea of “double consciousness” that forces African Americans to live in two worlds, divided by “the veil of race.” This veil prevents either of the inhabitants in these two universes from seeing each other or themselves clearly.
Du Bois developed the concept in The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. His ideas, Haigood notes, “are by no means out of date. The dilemma of who we are, what our position is in the world, and how we are perceived is really an important thing to explore.” A technical residency at ODC in January allowed her to work with media artist David Szlasa on “immersion technology” to create an environment that helps physicalize the concept of double consciousness. “It’s an enormous task,” she says while smiling ruefully, “and I don’t even know whether it is possible.”
Rita Felciano is the dance critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and a regular contributor to www.danceviewtimes.com.
Inset: Haigood rehearses Michael Velez and Byb Bibene in Dying While Black and Brown. Photo by Raissa Simpson, Courtesy Zaccho; Lomask and Wickett in The Monkey and the Devil (2008). Photo by Joseph Seif, Courtesy Zaccho; Al Pozzo di Sogno, at Oliver Ranch, CA, in which Haigood combined site-specific and aerial work. Photo by Chelsea O’Brien, Courtesy Zaccho; The Monkey and the Devil. Photo by Walter Kitundu, Courtesy Zaccho
“Pick Cells”
Dance Mission Theater
San Francisco, CA
November 11–13, 2011
Performance reviewed: Nov. 12
The Bay Area is a hotbed for mixed media, dance theater, and politically engaged experiments. So choreographer Raissa Punkki’s formal restraint, subdued imagery, and focus on the dancing body feels almost like a new idea. “Pick Cells,” a compilation of five smallish pieces performed as one unit, was Punkki’s first full-evening presentation after moving to San Francisco from Finland in 2005.
Though the program’s sequential logic was not entirely convincing, the individual parts, with one exception, communicated their intent clearly and with considerable conviction. At this point, Punkki excels in finely chiseled miniatures that take an idea and explore its implications: She is particularly skillful at creating suspense through an elastic use of time.
In numbERs, danced by Punkki, the soloist appears buffeted to and fro as if in a wind tunnel. Giving into and fighting that force becomes a struggle on constantly shifting ground. Albert Mathias score of children'a voices, reciting and messing up number sequences, gave the piece its appropriate aural component. Reality is a slyly amusing trio for Jennifer Meek, Sarah Keeney, and the older and smaller Punkki. She insidiously worms her way into the barely existing space between the two women. They challenged the intruder with an ever-tightening circular run.
Pulling time like taffy was at the core of two works. Weightingroom, with a sound score made by the dancers’ rustling paper costumes (by Claire Pasquier), was inspired by a railroad station’s waiting area. Its passengers sit, glare, and fuss until a mini-drama of attraction and rejection explodes between Patric Cushman and Keeney. Waiting develops as a single image. An inchoate mass under a huge, pleated cloth rises and evolves into rocks and other natural forms to end in the image of a shrouded, weeping female. It was the simplest of ideas yet so beautifully measured out that the final moments took your breath away.
The one misstep in this attractive program occurred in the middle with in 3D. Pascquier had created scintillating costumes, including masks and headdresses, for nine dancers, with the tall Cushman being a kind of leader. The audience was asked to put on 3D glasses, which made no sense, since a live performance is already three-dimensional. Perhaps the performers, processing around the stage, were meant to suggest shamans. But the choreography was so inconsequential and non-descript that they looked more like a group of Halloween revelers who got lost on their way home.
Photos, top to bottom: Patric Cashman and Sarah Keeney; Raisa Punkki. By Rob Kunkle, courtesy Dance Mission Theater.
When they bought an old hardware store in an industrial section of San Francisco’s Mission district in 1979, the nomads from Ohio didn’t think that they would end up with 36,000 square feet and 20 million dollars’ worth of debt-free real estate. They acquired the space because they were tired of creating studio environments only to be evicted. So ODC/Dance, then still known as the Oberlin Dance Collective and later, as ODC/SF, became one of the first American modern dance companies to buy a home. Thirty years later, shrouded in black veils, the remnants of the theater, small studios, and office space await a September 30 resurrection, to be celebrated with a gala and the premiere of ODC founder Brenda Way’s new piece.
The new ODC Theater now completes ODC’s two-campus facility (ODC Dance Commons opened in 2005). It includes three studios, staff offices, an expanded visual arts gallery, a media lab, space for additional programs, and—realizing a long-time dream of Way’s—an all-day, full-service café.
By pushing the new construction up instead of out, architects Mark Cavagnero Associates were able to build 13,000 square feet on land that ODC already owned. “We might have ‘fixed’ the old place,” Way explained, “but we wanted to stay current and allow a new generation of artists to realize their vision.” Still, the decision to “do it right” meant raising another nine million dollars, including money for a modest endowment.
On a hard-hat tour last June, theater director Rob Bailis clearly looked forward to having artists working in the reconfigured facility. “The old space had an 11-foot ceiling,” he said. By adding another story, “dancers now actually can do lifts.” The theater also has state-of-the-art sound and lighting, including a tech booth that can be reached by stairs instead of a ladder. Still, much looks familiar. The skylights, which make matinees so pleasant, return, as do the 170-seat (now steeply raked) capacity. Also incorporated into the design is the old 1940s-style curved entrance. The new façade, however, sports a decidedly 21st-century look: a three-story “green wall,” made up of living vegetation.
While the renovated space allows ODC Theater to undertake new projects (such as a media lab and dance archive), Bailis plans to expand and strengthen its original mission: to present local and touring groups, award residency and mentorship programs, and offer self-producing opportunities. Bailis points out that it always has had an identity separate from the dance company (ODC/Dance does not perform its home season there). In addition to presenting Bay Area dance, ODC Theater has hosted the debuts of national artists such as Ronald K. Brown, Nora Chipaumire, Eiko & Koma, and Bill T. Jones. The venue is also a member of the SCUBA touring network that pairs companies in SF, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia to form national tours.
For Bailis, ODC Theater was always intended to serve dance as a presenter of experimental work. “The theater,” he says, “is a house of risk.” The rewards belong to a new generation of artists who will create at ODC.
Rendering of the new ODC Theater building. Photo Courtesy ODC.
