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Alonzo King,
NP: How do you protect the spiritual dimension of your art within our materialist culture? AK: I think that you can't escape from what is spiritual. How can you? No matter what you do, that's what you're involved in. Who doesn't want transcendence? I think that when something is ‘practical’ and makes sense and is efficient, I think that's spiritual. When you meet anyone, the first question is, What's the motivation? Can I trust this person? And that's really trying to make visible what is invisible. All the time people are doing that. Is this real or is this fake gold? I don't see it as different. If you're going down a path that leads you to pain, that pain is going to be a teacher. And so it's a spiritual path because it's going to knock you in the head and wake you up somehow. We are a triumvirate of body, mind, and soul and I think that most people are closet-y about the soul part because it is private and personal and there's a fear of being thought of as stupid because of what a lot of people think about fundamentalist — fixed, rigid, not broad thinking. In looking at work, there are many levels that people can look on. If all of us went to a sunset there would be some people who would look at the colors, there are other people who would see the perfect circle and the perfect horizontal; there are other people who would go and they would see metaphor — the close of the day; other people would go and say ‘What's the big deal?’ So for some people who go to a ballet it might be the physicality, the commitment of the body; for others it might be musicality, how you work with music, for some people it's nothing but line. Everyone has a different plug in. Working with dancers, there are some who are completely cerebral, so you speak to them that way. Other people, everything is metaphor, so you speak to them that way. For other people it's about construction and design... and that's what so interesting about art, that it yields many meanings. For me, I'm obsessed with making the work accurate, with really honing it so that when I look at it, it's ringing true. Now there may be people who'll go, because you go with your consciousness... People want to feel that they can identify with something. If you look at celebrity, that's how it works. People identify with this icon or that group — it’s identification. It's a balancing act. And I think that the combination of science and devotion is a great combination. I think that the term "ballet" is really a misnomer. I think it should be called ‘western classical dance’ and that every culture has its classical dance. And in every culture it's the same aspiration: it's what's permanent over what's temporary. And if you study the classical works of other cultures you'll see the same idea in ballet — the exact same ideas. The union of things has always been more powerful to me than the separation of things. There is no separate idea. They come from some kind of universal principle. You look at stories, fairy tales, what is it? It's metaphysics in those stories. So behind all these forms, especially if they've stayed with us, if they have universality, there's got to be some truth there. And if we're not being taught it, I want to find out about it myself. |
 Alonzo King's Lines Ballet dancer Artur Sultanov. Photo courtesy of Marty Sohl. |
NP: Are you concerned about the economic survival of the arts in America? AK: If we have a society where children are not introduced to art, and then they grow up and we say, ‘This is good because...it's sexy...or… it's like the Rockettes.’ You can't trick them. People feel uncomfortable with theatrical dance. They don't want to feel stupid. They don't want to feel tricked. So they don't take it in. I think "audience development" is to put art back in schools. I think audience development means that children are given access to musical instruments, or that they're always dancing, or that someone is talking to them about what art is. We don't really honor art in this country. We honor money, what we can measure as our deity. We don't believe in the power of art, and yet you can't get away from it, it's pervasive. It's in our clothes, in the cars, in our architecture, poor art in our leadership, our elected officials. You can't get away from it. The art of manufacture, how do you get away from that? The knowledge of how things are done, from making ballets to making a civic life that's healthy for all individuals — they’re inseparable. It has to begin with the children. |