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Dance Discursion:
Alonzo King and Nicole Plett in Conversation with members of the Philadelphia Dance Community
| Editor's Note In June 2001, Dance Advance brought Alonzo King, choreographer and artistic director of Lines Contemporary Ballet, San Francisco, to Philadelphia to conduct a four-day “Choreographic Encounter” for the city’s professional choreographers. The conversation that follows was recorded on June 22, 2001, during a public forum that was part of this residency. Titled “Dance Discursion (aka Dance Chat),” Alonzo King spoke with Nicole Plett, a dance critic and arts editor of U.S. 1 Newspaper (Princeton, N.J.), at the Meeting House Theater and Community Education Center. The presentation was also videotaped for Temple University's Dance Collection. The transcript printed here has been edited for space and clarity. NP: Was there anything your mother said to you when you were a small boy that has stayed with you in the way you work and the way you are in the world? AK: The first thing that comes to my mind, I remember I received an award at school, some special award, and I ran home to show my mother. And I said, `Mom, mom, look what I got.' And she looked at me and she looked at it and she said, `Does that make you happy?' And I thought, `Huh?' Because I thought she'd say `Good boy!' and embrace me. And she said `Does that make you happy? Does that change things for you?' And that's all she said, and it left such a deep impression. I only understood it more and more as I got older. My father would sit down in meditation: He was really different, really different. He was a follower of Rama Krishna and he introduced us to meditation at an early age. He had a meditation room in the house where he made the children go for three minutes at a time. That set something up in us. And we would just do that regularly—until puberty set in and we needed help! Then we started reading some of his library and talking to him. He was really different, really different in his views. My mother was an amateur dancer. She had danced at university, studied dance interpretation, and performed with the Orchesis group... So she would show me things when I was a kid. I was always surrounded by music. Always people from different cultures were coming into the house. And there would always be a moment when they would show dances or play music or talk about things that they believed in. So I think that had an impact. |
 Alonzo King's Lines Ballet dancer Marina Hotchkiss. Photgraph by Marty Sohl. |
NP: Did you study an instrument? Do you still play? AK: I played piano as a child, but not any longer. I play the harmonium now a lot. NP: In Janet Lynn Roseman's book Dance Masters: Interviews with Legends of Dance, Routledge, 2001 you talk about the transformative experience of serving as an altar boy in a Catholic church. Could you tell us about this? AK: When I was a kid we had to go to mass in the school that I was in... But serving [as an altar boy] was a way for me of becoming something else and kind of fitting into the flow. And when I would watch the older members of the congregation—their reverence and their belief, observing where they were in that mental state, this was something that was very powerful to see. It was private, it was centered, it was interior—and it was beautiful. I think when you observe anyone believing in something it's a powerful thing to see. If you look at children, the way that they look at their parents with so much conviction and trust and openness, it's illuminating. It's an amazing thing to see. NP: When did you begin dancing? AK: I think that I never ever stopped dancing, so I don't feel like I began dancing. It was just something that was with me. And so when people talked to me about, ‘This is dancing,’ or ‘This is a career,’ or ‘This is a job’ — I never thought of it that way. It was just dancing. And since I had developed a really strong world about dance myself, and it was experiential, I'd always been dancing. I'd dance with my mother, with friends, we were always making dances, so when I began training I didn't look at as something big and powerful, this monolith of information. I just thought, ‘Oh, here's some more dancing, in another way.’ NP: You began to study ballet as a child? AK: Yes, I felt ballet was home. I felt that it was universal and limitless in ways that I had felt limited by other forms. I felt that it was unlimited. NP: You came to ballet and recognized it as being like other dance? AK: Categories, names, and titles—I don't feel and understand things that way. When most people think about ballet they think of it as some Eurocentric form of dance that was begun by Catherine de Medici, that was stamped with the French language, and that was glorified in Russia. I think that really is a misnomer. I think that ballet really has beginnings that were much earlier and that it's really a journey of dance, that was interpreted a certain way. And all the journeys take people different places. Terms like arabesque, pavanne—where do they really come from? We underestimate the influences of other cultures on Europe. But all the principles that are in classical ballet are in the geometry brought to Europe from the Arabs. So I look on it as a science of movement. Most people think of it as a style and they associate it with the Romantic period in Europe. It's not a style... It's a language that can be used in a limitless way. Integration has been with ballet since the beginning—from France to Russia…bringing in steps from Spain. This notion that there can be a possession of ideas, by anybody, is crazy. It's a truth that was discovered. If yoga had not been discovered in India, it would have been discovered somewhere else, because it is a living truth. You receive the information, you share it. The origin of things is much deeper than people suppose. When people talk about ‘tradition,’ most of the time they're talking about the ‘customs’ of certain places. Tradition, in the true sense, goes back to the primordial. The crucifix that's in ballet is — that’s the beginning of time. It's talking about eternity, non-stop, the material plane, how they intersect. Ballet is riddled with symbolism: the idea of the circle. The tendu — what is tendu? It's a non-stop line addressing eternity. It all is referred to again and again. But we're taught these movements and these shapes without being taught what are they referring to; but what do they mean? And so what happens, there becomes an idolatry of the body, because people don't know any more what these things are about. Except some people do. They don't verbalize it. But by the way that they move, they're letting you know that they understand. |