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LINES dancer Keelan Whitmore in "Azimuth".
Amber Bliss photo
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Last Wednesday (March 20) in Overture Hall,
Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago celebrated their
temporary merger. The unusual combined
program revealed a formidable gulf between the two decidedly different dance
companies, and an elegantly constructed bridge across it.
On the bill were one
substantial work by each troupe plus by a piece King choreographed for both
together, fashioned from a difficult long-distance process that involved two
brief in-the-flesh meetings and lots of communications via YouTube and email. First up was LINES’ 40-minute “Rasa” (2007),
which rose miles above the rest of the program.
“Rasa,” like all of King’s visionary ballets, is a work straight from
the heart, built on a rich, complex score by tabla master Zakir Hussein, whose world beat / classical approach mixed percussion instruments, droning
sitar, chants, and the syllabic rhythms that lie behind all tabla playing. Other choreographers, including current Ailey
artistic director Robert Battle and Madison’s own Li Chiao Ping have used Sheila
Chandra’s “Speaking in Tongues” Indiapop takes on vocalized tabla, which drive movement in similarly percussive ways.
And other dance companies have brought Indian temple art to life
onstage. Probably the best of these is
the soulful Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, an India-based folkloric collective
dediated to the spirit, philosophy and theory of classical Indian dance
arranged for contemporary theater.
But King goes where no
choreographer has gone before. He turns the
Hindu deities – the many-limbed Krishnas and Shivas and Durgas, flexing their
feet and wrists – into pure
abstractions, telling untold but universal myths. Their story specifics and
cultural accoutrements – the elephant trunks, beads and polychrome paint – are
stripped away. Under shifting conditions
of golden light, King’s remarkable dancers, in brief, neutral toned dancewear, resonate
with Hussein’s score. Their fluidity
breathes vibrant life into the angular poses and flexed appendages of
temple art. Elasticity originates deep in the dancers’ cores, legs spidering
into space, pairs of arms whipping through light creating the optical illusion
of many.
None of this movement
would be imaginable without exquisite ballet training, and yes, the western
classical vocabulary is there too, in all its glory – luxurious attitude turns,
pique turns in sixth, outrageously extended penché arabesques, pas de chats and
brisés, entrechat six, chaine turns, flying second position split leaps, more.
The deities’ allegories –
their struggles and unities – emerge onstage. Within shifting groups pairs of
dancers merge, male and female aspects of a single god. In the fifth movement the very powerful
Keelan Whitmore, conjuring Agni, lord of sacrifice and fire, leaps and spins
like raging flames, his many arms stretching toward infinity.
It would be wrong to call
“Rasa” performance. It’s a piece of pure
dance, entirely lacking artifice. It seemed akin to tribal ritual, or the way
you might dance yourself, at home alone with the volume turned up. You might spot it in a nightclub where a pair
of extraordinary salseros, loose and totally unselfconscious, are dancing right
on clave. The immense difference between
almost all of us and King’s company, of course, is natural balletic ability,
flawless technique, and awe-inspiring stamina.
On the heels of “Rasa,”
Hubbard Street resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo’s “Little Mortal Jump”
(2012) fell flat. If “Rasa” was a
universal abstraction of Hindu theology filtered through the language of
western classical dance, “Little Mortal Jump” was a Euro-American abstraction
of dance numbers in a generic broadway show. The shift in focus was anticlimatic, the drop
in energy precipitous.
Still, within those
parameters, Cerrudo’s piece had its charms.
Hubbard Street dancers are very proficient at the quirky contemprary
vocabulary they’re known for. The piece,
full of magic tricks with giant moveable black cubes, wove a series of pas de
deux through sections in which larger groups prevailed. The first pas de deux was
flirtatious; later, a pair of dancers in heavily velcroed suits stuck
themselves to the cubes, then stripped away the suits to return to the floor. In the final pas de deux the previously cool
light went golden. The man (the names of
the soloists in each movement weren’t listed in the program) lifted the woman
high overhead, upside down; under the bright light this seemed deftly surreal. The two dancers ran, circling each other,
under bright spots; then, like alien abductees, they disappeared into a golden passageway
that opened up amidst the cubes, which, being spun through space by other
dancers, leant a satisfyingly hallucinatory feel to the end of this dance.
In “Azimuth,” the raison
d’etre for the entire evening, King worked miracles, pulling all the stops out
of Hubbard Street’s dancers and merging them with LINES. “Azimuth” looked like a LINES work, albeit
one with slightly tamer technique – though the sheer number of bodies onstage
(28 rather than 12) was arresting enough to compensate.
“Azimuth” is a big,
meditative work rich with unison flow, though LINES’ dancers generally stood
out. The men of the two companies
blended better than the women; four Hubbard Street men were especially stunning
in a very active section with LINES’ Keelan Whitmore and Ricardo Zayas.
There were a few rough
edges – not surprising in a work mostly made long-distance. Smart, minimal
dancewear showed off the remarkable mix of bodies, and the lighting was lush. But
the score – an odd jumble of original music by Bay Area composer Ben
Judovalkis, Russian liturgical songs, spirituals, and other sounds – sometimes
got in the way. And – unlike the crystal
clear concepts in “Rasa” – King’s abstraction of azimuth, a geometric angle
between an observer, a point of interest, and true north – didn’t pop out till
the end. In King’s personal book of
cosmic geometry, azimuth is the distance between where a person stands, where
his or her attention is fixed, and how that separation is obliterated. The achievement of pure dance – the merging of
choreography and spirit that’s a hallmark of King’s works, including this one –
is a manifestation of azimuth, though a subtle one.
What nailed the notion was
the final pas de deux between LINES’ Meredith Webster and David Harvey. In it were echoes of “Rasa”’s couplings, neatly
bookending the program. Webster and
Harvey pushed and pulled each other, then obliterated the separation; when she
sat on his shoulders they became – they didn’t impersonate, they became – an
eight-limbed being. Other bodies lay
upstage in the dark, moving shapes barely seen.
Against this mysterious backdrop Webster and Harvey separated
physically, but their energies went on flowing together – the two, beyond
shadow of doubt, were one.
That’s azimuth, as King
defines it, to a T.
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