SOME OF THE LINES ARE JAGGED 
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of April 20-27, 2009
                                                                  Vol. 11, No. 94
          The LINES Ballet of San Francisco has a style unto its own, jagged and jarring. But the sell-out throngs turning out April 18 were caught up in this idiom and cheered the dancers on. 
            It’s a mindset of conflict. Women push men away. Figures contort and gyrate into severe geometries. Men sling women over their shoulders, like hunters with game. The dances are full of exclamation points, via pointed fingers, abrupt swivels  and wrist snaps. Dancers repeatedly make deep bends from the waist and elbow. Shaman-like figures manipulate others.
            There are still toe shoes, of course, and arabesques here and there. But the long, flowing lines of ballet, ironically, are absent at LINES.
            This is Alonzo King’s company, with the nine dancers doing all-King post-1990 choreography in color-blind casting. The performers are arresting, none of them more memorable than the towering, muscular  soloist Corey Scott-Gilbert, reminiscent of that Joffrey Ballet star of a generation ago, Christian Holder. While the other men appear content to look like interchangeable parts, Scott-Gilbert towers above them, figuratively and literally.
            The King style was epitomized in the pas de deux “Splash” (1992), where Scott-Gilbert partnered the deft, agile Meredith Webster.
             In the world premiere “Dust and Light,” all possible permutations of gender and race are drawn into interactions of two or three. There are flying, flailing arms. And what may or may not be tortured souls crawling abjectly on the stage, plus repeated motifs of figures falling, tipping, barely caught.
            King's no-pain-no-gain appears to be reacting against the prettiness of older ballet, shining a light on harsh realities in relationships between people, maybe even nations, while using a minimum of distracting costumes and scenic decor.  
            In “Signs and Wonders” (1995), with traditional African music, there’s a seeming return to Genesis and origins of the species in a world of turmoil.
            Enhancing the unsettling atmosphere is a prerecorded score that is turned up painfully loud, distorting even the string ensembles of 18th-century Corelli. 
            LINES is a learning experience that transforms, never one to be taken lightly.
            LINES Ballet, dances by Artistic Director Alonzo King, through April 26, Yerba Buena Gardens Theater, S.F. With prerecorded music. For info: (415) 863-3040, or go online. 

        ©Paul Hertelendy 2009
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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 books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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