October 16, 2002

By Rita Felciano

FOR ANY DANCE company, surviving 20 years is an accomplishment. Alonzo King's Lines Ballet has done more than that. It is known nationally (and increasingly internationally) for its distinctive perspective on ballet; through the San Francisco Dance Center, it is running the Bay Area's largest teaching and training facility, and it has created a whole new audience for dance – one that, without King, probably wouldn't give ballet another thought. At 20, Lines has become an institution. Not that Lines' artistic director and choreographer has done it alone: without senior director Pamela Hagen, who tenaciously and patiently built the company's support structure, King might not have made it.

King's major accomplishment is that he has stripped ballet of its European context and has discarded a centuries-old set of prescribed steps. What he has kept is a commitment to the body's stylization and its extension into space. Most fundamentally, he has embraced ballet's vision of the world as a place that strives, in his words, for "balance, harmony, and poise." Historically, in ballet, those elements have reflected existing social structures; King perceives them as natural, as universe's potential made manifest by the dancer.

For the first of his 20th-anniversary concerts (Oct. 10, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater), King set a series of duets, trios, and solos afloat in a pure sea of music and dance. It was intriguing to watch how the dancers variously coped with the physically extended but emotionally restrained exigencies of King's choreography, particularly given the fact that half of his ensemble is new. But the evening's lack of theatrical thrust became wearing. Fortunately, the brilliant costumes (by Cari Borja, Robert Rosenwasser, and Sandra Woodall) and lighting (by Axel Morgenthaler) compensated for the material's aridity. It was an evening that could not, and possibly should not, be replicated.

Appropriate to the ceremonial occasion of a gala, King opened the performance with patterns like those that might have been seen in a 16th-century French court. Deploying his handsome troupe in a series of processions – diagonals, opposing lines, chains, a circle, and a triangle – he modified that formality by movement outbursts from individual dancers.

In the first act King seemed to examine another of ballet's conventions, that in which the male dancer offers the woman for view and serves as her steadying support. In King's duets the man doesn't present the woman, but he does act as an enabling force, stabilizing her off-center balances, supporting her angular thrusts, and following her into knotted-limb combinations. Newcomers Drew Jacoby, Laurel Keen, and Chiharu Shibata were anything but docile females. Prince Credell (a compact dancer of focused attacks and velvety landings) and Brett Conway (who possesses a remarkably expressive torso) also made their debuts in this section.

The highest-profile debut came from guest artist Rasta Thomas, a San Francisco-born virtuoso dancer now peripatetically roaming the world of dance. Known for his speed and spectacular jump, he proved himself remarkably restrained, integrating well into the ensemble. Thomas's eloquent upper body and arms also proved that he can do more than jump. But why was he given a Bach piece while the rest of the ensemble had to perform to musical fragments that made no more sense than patched wallpaper? Musical acuity is not one of King's trademarks.

The second act opened with an overture by Pharaoh Sanders and his band of glorious musicians. They raised the theater's temperature. A male trio for Gregory Dawson, Artur Sultanov, and Credell gratifyingly showed the individuality King encourages within what is admittedly a cool expressive range. La Tania's dramatic flamenco solo arrived in the wake of a brief passage performed by Lauren Porter, now the company's most powerful female dancer. It would have been illustrative to see both dancers share the musical space of Jesus Montoya's Middle Eastern-flavored flamenco singing. Despite apparent differences between ballet and flamenco, the latter's inclusion made sense. Flamenco is an art that requires the centering and strong internal focus found in King's choreography – and La Tania is excellent at it.

The evening reached its most satisfying point with a section from the 1994 Ocean, accompanied by Sanders and his musicians. Seemingly endless lines of dancers emerged from a blinding source of offstage light only to stray into darkness. A cycle of generation and decay became visible. Then a man and a woman (Kerr and Conway) appeared, their arms entwined – an image of opposing principles but in harmony.