Point of View
When I first met Alonzo King in June 2001, he was widely known and respected as the founder and artistic director of Lines Contemporary Ballet, a San Francisco company then approaching its twentieth anniversary. I was introduced to him by Bill Bissell of Dance Advance. During that summer, King was also at work on the most ambitious collaborative project of his career, The People of the Forest. The evening-length work was created over a period of two years, in collaboration with Nzamba Léla, a sixteen-member ensemble of musician-dancers of the BaAka people (more commonly known as Pygmies) of the Ituri rainforest of the Central African Republic. Despite the shock and disruption of autumn 2001’s terrorist attacks, King’s ballet premiered on schedule, October 5, 2001, at the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Florida in Gainesville. It then proceeded on its six-week national tour to cities that included Newark, San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin.
Ambitious as it is, and hampered by the extraordinary national crisis that marked the final stage of its creation, Forest is one of more than 165 dances that King has choreographed over his thirty years in the profession. Like a plucked string, Forest resonates with a chord of thematic strands that wind through this artist’s career: choreographic invention, ballet innovation, teaching and mentoring, mysticism and spirituality, and cross-cultural collaboration.
In this essay I attempt to bring together the story of the man and his dance company and the creation of this single ballet, The People of the Forest. I do so by chronicling my meetings with King in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Newark, and attempt to give an overview of what I learned of his dance thinking and dance practice. I look for the roots of King’s art and the skills and resources that he brings to his ballets. I try to visualize his creative process and understand the guiding personal philosophy—coupled with a lifetime’s experience—that shaped and brought this particular dance into being. I attempt to frame possible answers to my questions in the larger context of intellectual, spiritual, and practical concerns King shares with thinkers and artists who have gone before him. As Forest became manifest to me, I was struck by the myriad points of meeting, and eventually by the idea of a kinship, between King and Colin M. Turnbull, the British-born anthropologist, spiritual seeker, and author of The Forest People (1961). Turnbull dedicated his early and enduring story of the Pygmy peoples of central Africa to a forest dancer: “To Kenge, for whom the forest was Mother and Father, Lover and Friend; and who showed me something of the love that all his people share in a world that is still kind and good. And without evil” (note 1)
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