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About Alonzo King
Choreographer and dancer Alonzo King is artistic director of Lines Contemporary Ballet, the company he founded in San Francisco in 1982 with Robert Rosenwasser, associate artistic director, and Pam Hagen, executive director. A company of 14 dancers, Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet celebrates its 20th anniversary year in 2002 under the trio’s enduring leadership. Lines Ballet also administers the San Francisco Dance Center, a facility that provides rehearsal space for 12 resident companies, and studios and classes for some 8,000 adult students Relocated in January 2002 to the Odd Fellows Hall at 7th and Market Street, Lines Ballet also makes its home here. Lines’ performing home is the city's new Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, located directly across from the vaunted new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. |
 Photo courtesy of Marty Sohl. |
Working in collaboration with his company of dancers, some of whom have been with the company almost since its founding, King is the maker of some 165 dances. His distinctive, personalized dance language explores, extends, and defies assumed boundaries between classical ballet, modern dance, and world dance. Although his movement vocabulary is firmly rooted in the classical canon -- much of it executed with the uncompromising authority of pointe work – King taps into the expressive arsenal of modern dance structures for abstract, episodic works that are yet underlaid with a narrative thread. A long-time disciple of yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, his compelling dance works appeal to the kinesthetic senses and to the heart. King’s dances are in the repertoires of 50 companies, among them Frankfurt Ballet, Hong Kong Ballet, Dresden Ballet, Dance Theater of Harlem, Joffrey Ballet, and the Washington Ballet. A recent commissioned work for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Following the Subtle Current Upstream, was featured in that company's 2001 season. Raised in Albany, Georgia, and in Santa Barbara, California, King's father was Slater King, a leading civil rights activist and prominent member of Albany's business community. Slater King, in turn, was one of seven activist sons of Clennon W. King, co-founder of the Albany chapter of the NAACP, and a leader of the crucial Albany bus boycott of the early 1960s. Alonzo's parents and grandparents were all graduates of Fisk University in Tennessee, where King also matriculated; however, he left after a year to pursue his career in dance. As a young woman Alonzo King's mother, Valencia King Nelson, was an amateur dancer and a member of an interpretive dance group at Fisk. The younger of the couple’s two sons, Alonzo’s parents divorced while the boys were growing up. Both parents remarried, yet they continued to maintain close family relations, even vacationing together with their children. Exposed to a range of dance ideas and idioms in his youth, King says that when he arrived in the ballet studio he immediately sensed “that this was home.” From an early age he recognized European ballet for its deep-rooted connection to all dance -- to the truths of geometry, symbolism, and a quest for transcendence. King began ballet training as a child and in his teens went to New York to train at the Harkness School of Ballet, at the Alvin Ailey Dance School, eventually studying on full scholarship and stipend at the American Ballet Theater School. As a young dancer he performed with the Harkness Youth Company, with the companies of Donald McKayle and Lucas Hoving, and in Europe, before leaving the East Coast to work with modern dancer Bella Lewitzky in Los Angeles. He also became known for his coaching of principal dancers one of whom was Natalia Makarova. Lines Ballet has a repertory composed almost exclusively of works by King. Since 1994, he has placed an emphasis on collaborating with creative composers and musicians he admires. These have included Pharoah Sanders, Zakir Hussain, Hamza El Din, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Miguel Fransconi, and Leslie Stuck. In Fall, 2001, King presented his most ambitious project to date, The People of the Forest, a work created over a period of two years in collaboration with Nzamba Lela, a 16-member ensemble of musician-dancers of the Ba’Aka (commonly known as Pygmy) people of the Ituri rainforest of the Central African Republic. The People of the Forest had its world premiere in Gainesville, Florida, on October 5, 2001, and was presented on tour in Burlington, Vermont; Newark, New Jersey; San Francisco; Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and Austin, Texas. The evening-length dance and music performance is designed to dramatize Ba’Aka culture whose ritual observances are steeped in music – primarily a cappella harmonic song – and dance. King says The People of the Forest arose from a commitment to create contemporary ballet with a variety of multicultural music and a shared sense of spirituality. The Austin leg of The People of the Forest tour included a significant humanities component, in advance of, and during, the tour. The result was a series of roundtable discussions, scholarly essays, and audience outreach projects. These can be accessed on the web at http://www.yerbabuenaarts.org/education/essays/pforest/intro.html Return to Alonzo King Dance Discursion |
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