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| LINES Ballet dancer Meredith Webster, center, with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Alonzo King LINES Ballet in Azimuth. Amber Bliss photo. |
by Susan Kepecs
Established, highly successful dance
companies don’t combine as a matter of course. I can’t rememver ever seeing two
troupes merge in a single work. But on March
20, in Overture Hall, two very different organizations – the San
Francisco-based Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago – perform
separately and then come together in a brand-new work choreographed by King.
The sheer logistics of
this temporary merging seem almost impossible. Both companies are multicultural
and beautifully trained, but the similarities end there. Hubbard Street, which performs in Madison
almost annually, is a contemporary repertory company known for clever,
accessible works built on the technical triumvirate of ballet, jazz and “modern”
plus a slick, Euro-chic aesthetic obtained via the company’s deep ties with
Nederlands Dans Theater. Former Hubbard Street artistic director Jim Vincent left
Chicago for NDT in 2009 (though he’s since moved on); Hubbard’s current leader,
Glenn Edgerton, also has long-term NDT links, and Hubbard’s resident
choreographer, Alejandro Cerrudo, from Spain, is a Nederlands alum.
LINES, which appeared at
the Wisconsin Union Theater twice, in 2005 and again in 2010, is simply the unique
artistic vision of Alonzo King, whose artifice-free ballets – compositions of
cosmic geometry at once more ancient than Europe and newer than today – are like
images from the mind’s eye of a Zen master, framed in the tangled roots of
western classical dance. In order to carry off King’s conceptions, his post-neoclassical
ballet dancers possess an elastic vocabulary that subsumes the sum of human
possibility without sacrificing perfection of line, form and flow.
The program consists of three
substantive pieces, which, taken together, allow the audience see what each company
is made of and then to ponder the mysterious amalgam that is “Azimuth,”
choreographed by King.
King’s “Rasa” (2007),
which opens the evening, was chosen, I suppose, because it’s a LINES signature
piece that’s toured the globe. It
features a score by Indian tabla master Zakir Hussain, with whom King has
collaborated several times. The dance is
built of shifting pas de deux and ensemble movements that condense in the
interplay of light, rhythmic energies and the astonishing physicality of LINES’
dancers.
Representing Hubbard
Street is Cerrudo’s “Little Mortal Jump” (2012). “It’s one of Alejandro’s
latest works,” Edgerton says. “I feel it
represents where he is with his choreography right now. I chose him because he’s our resident
choreographer, and “Little Mortal Jump” was made on the current company, so it
also represents where all of us are right now.
It’s a wonderful piece, entertaining but thought-provoking. It’s lighthearted but it turns substantial at
the end, with the last duet. It’s a
series of vignettes – there’s no story to it, but there’s a trajectory. Without being literal it takes you on an
emotional path. It has incredible stage theatrics, and the music’s very
powerful and dramatic, especially at the end. The work leaves you with this
really great feeling.
“It’s a fantastic
program,” Edgerton continues. “’Rasa’ and ‘Little Mortal Jump’ are vastly
different, and then in ‘Azimuth’ [which features all twelve LINES dancers and
sixteen of Hubbard Street’s eighteen] we have both companies together –
twenty-eight people onstage. It’s very
powerful, how all these artists with very different backgrounds intermingle.”
The collaboration came
about, Edgerton says, because he was at LINES three years ago watching King’s company
rehearse. “I was fascinated with
Alonzo’s way of working with dancers –the way he was challenging them – and I wanted
my dancers to experience that. Both
companies are classically trained, but they approach that training
differently. I said to Alonzo, ‘our
dancers are so vastly different from yours – wouldn’t it be interesting to show
that juxtaposition?’ But what we ended
up with was showing the likeness instead. Alonzo made a wonderful work that shows how
dance is a universal language; the two companies come together in movement and
expression, and it’s very exciting.”
It’s not just the
finished piece – the whole process was exciting, Edgerton clarifies. “My dancers loved working with LINES’
dancers, as people and as artists. I
could see it in their faces, but I also heard it directly from them. I could see how the LINES dancers also were
inspired by my dancers – it was a win-win situation all the way, and it was
very enriching for all of us to work together.”
That said, most of the work
took place across 1863 miles, as the crow flies. “The initial stage involved taking a piece of
Alonzo’s into the company,” Edgerton says.
That ballet, “Following the Current Upstream,” originally was created
for Alvin Ailey Dance Theater in 2000.
“We got to live in that
piece first,” Edgerton says. “After we
absorbed it [it became part of Hubbard Street’s repertory in 2011], we started
working on the collaboration. Alonzo came
to Chicago to work on it, and then we worked on it separately. Alonzo sent us his notes and we sent our
rehearsal comments or questions back – ‘what is the intention of this step or
the other?’ We also worked back and
forth via video, so we were well set up to fit the two companies together in a
very short time – though of course there was a great deal of trust and
understanding involved all along.”
After a year of this
long-distance affair the two companies met at UC Irvine late last summer. “We engaged an old colleague of mine there,
Jodie Gates, because we’d agreed that we should work on neutral territory so
one company didn’t feel like the other’s guest – and we thought a university
dance program would be interested in watching Alonzo create a new work, and in
having students watch the process of two companies coming together unfold,”
Edgerton says. “It all worked out beautifully. And then we reconvened in January, a few days
before the premiere [at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, on Feb. 1].”
It’s worth noting that
this program is only slated for four cities – after Berkeley it goes to
Chicago’s Harris Theater (Mar. 14-17), and after the Madison performance it
makes one last stop in Los Angeles, in June.
Despite the short time the companies spent
together, “Azimuth” has beauty and power, King told me after the Berkeley
premiere.
Azimuth is a perfect Alonzo
King concept. In astronomy, the azimuth
is the angle of a celestial object along the arc of the observer’s horizon
measured from a fixed point, usually north; for example, due north has an
azimuth of 0, and due east’s is 90 degrees. But since King’s cosmic geometry isn’t
literal, I asked what azimuth means to him, and what he did with the idea in
this dance.
“For me,” he says, “where
a person stands is the axis mundi. Where you are as you stand on this sphere in
space – and where you fix your attention – that’s azimuth. Where you’re standing and where your attention
is are separated by distance. Art or
love eradicates subject and object – when two become one, time and distance are
anihilated because of absorption. The
aspiration of a fixed figure at any point on earth is usually a diagonal,
reaching up. How do you combine heaven
and earth, bring willpower and goal and desire into one spot? The idea of the word ‘heaven’ is a
trigger. People think of an old white
man in the sky. But heaven is what your joy is.
Humans want to avoid pain and suffering – to find joy that doesn’t go
stale. Our choices are based on those
things. Everyone has some dream or is in
love with something and with that you want union, you want to get rid of separation. I love you – that’s a separation. Lao Tse says that the painter has to become
the horse before he paints the horse.
That’s what you have to do as a dancer.
You’re inhabiting an idea. It’s
not a step. If you just do steps you’re
frozen, without luminance. So that’s the
point of ‘Azimuth.’”
Like geometry, music is a
key to King’s works. I’m always reminded
of string theory – the idea that everything in the universe is composed of tiny
vibrating strings, and so, as theoretical physicist Michio Kaku says, “we are
nothing but cosmic melodies” played out on the instrument of our bodies. For “Azimuth,” King chose some original music
by Millennial generation Bay Area composer Ben Juodvalkis, and a lot of Russian
liturgical chants. “Those Russians
singing liturgical – you don’t hear it that often, and they do it so damn well,
with a kind of release and Russian gusto and sincerity – it plugs into all
kinds of release-based music. It’s not
about a pretty sound, but a true sound, like the soul is singing. The Russians are very soulful in that
way. And the technique is
faultless. The source of that sound is a
heartspace. It’s quite moving, and it’s
important to put something that’s moving from the heart into the theater – people
in the audience are so cerebral and battered by the reality of living life in
the world. You want to embrace, not
batter them. I was just reading an
article on Alternet.com. The writer was
bemoaning that art isn’t more political, that apolitical art is meaningless,
and I thought – what’s more political than saying ‘you are the answer and you
are the problem, and there are states beyond the halloween show of the world.’”
That’s a revealing
statement. To “get” it – and to get the
full impact of King’s ballets – you have to be willing to detach, breathe, and
enter that state the mindfulness gurus call open space. If “Azimuth” turns out to be as effective as
King’s works for LINES alone, the energies of 28 highly diverse, exquisitely
trained dancers coming together at a fixed point – the Overture Hall stage – should
offer plenty to meditate on.
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