THE KING IS BACK, WITH IMPACT (NO, NOT THAT ONE!)
                                              By Paul Hertelendy
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music & dance
                                                                 Week of April 10-17, 2004
                                                                  Vol. 6, No. 96
        Serge Diaghilev used to tell his creative artists, "Astonish me!"
        San Francisco choreographer Alonzo King achieves just that in a wildly varied program of 1,001 dance styles with his LINES, nominally billed as a ballet company. The troupe is modern, at times post-modern, at times devoid of ballet steps altogether. King speaks to the eclectic younger generation; his vision is of 21st-century dance having many and often distant influences, expanding the proverbial envelope.
        These are dances to make you sit up, focus and tune in intently, with rarely a soothing massage for the dinosaur fringe in the audience.
        His "The Patience of Aridity, Waiting for Petrichor" for instance is hardly comfortable or comforting, no more so than the title itself---a taut, angular exercise in disorientation, with dancers in crouches, or in body configurations of Z, F, or crucifix. King may be purposefully obscure in meaning and message. The new word petrichor, for instance, is a smell of an oily essence that comes from rocks or soil after a rain.
        There is little release or relaxation in the dances: even the lovers, like the superb Laurel Keen and John M. Schert doing the finale, are in a tense, locked-jaw relationship.
        Indeed, such is the trademark of King's choreography, which is used exclusively by this multiracial troupe of 11 (swelling to 24 for "The Rite of Spring"). King's moves are quick, complex and staccato, with every limb constantly turning, churning and thrusting in a restless space of wilful turbulence.
        King's "The Rite of Spring" reverts to the familiar (and highly dissonant) Stravinsky score  but only alludes obliquely to the well-known 1913 scenario of ritual/adoration/sacrifice that had so shocked the ballet world. The Chosen One, for instance, is played sequentially by two different women.
        As a visceral display of frenzied tribal rites, this piece brings great energy to the stage, leaving this viewer with an unanswered question: Are the wild gyrations of the tribal mass intentional, or an unruliness ascribed to insufficient rehearsal?
        The various apprentices and add-ons throw themselves into the fray with abandon, at any rate. Adding to the mystery, the crescendo finale has celebrants throwing fine white dust in the air, dancing around the Chosen One. That's either a purification rite, an allusion to drug-fired revelry, or the makings of a really bad hair day.
        Two long solos opening the Rite's two sections were brilliantly and indefatigably done by Laurel Keen and Prince Credell.
        Josephine Baker conquered Paris between the world wars, an African-American noted for her bilingual songs, her dancing, her stunning sculptor's body and her nudity. In King's tribute "Baker Fix," Maurya Kerr and Lauren Porter Worth scraped at the varied surface of Baker through Charlestons and Haitian dances with a lot of energy but little verisimilitude. King alluded to the nudity obliquely with a risque costume. 
        A Coleman Hawkins tribute showed off the company veteran Chiharu Shibata in the night's most balletic moves, opposite Credell, when seen April 9.
        "RITE OF SPRING" ADDENDA---When that earth-shaking ballet premiered in Paris in 1913, its modernism shocked the traditionalist ballet-goers, producing the biggest ballet riot in history, with hooting and hollering drowning out the music. What is now forgotten was the reprise of the revolutionary work in a concert hall a year later, with the very same conductor, Pierre Monteux, on the podium, and half the intelligentsia of Paris eagerly in attendance. Among them was composer Darius Milhaud, who told us that, in contrast to the 1913 scandal, the concert reprise was a wild, wild success. From that point on, "Rite" had legs, both rite and left.
         Alonzo King's LINES Ballet in one program of four works, with prerecorded music. Yerba Buena Center Theater, 3rd and Howard, S.F., through April 18. Also Mountain View, April 29-May 1. For info: (415) 978-2787, or on-line.
        ©Paul Hertelendy 2004
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        Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into recordings by local artists, books (by authors of the region) and theater as well.
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