“Every beginning starts with an idea,” Alonzo King told me when we talked through our screens from across the country. “It’s like Athena appearing out of Zeus’s head. That metaphor reaffirms that it’s idea first. People talk about technique, but no. It’s idea first, and then you build techniques to follow the blueprint, so the idea is realized in a physical form.”
We were discussing the origins of Deep River, the evening-length work his San Francisco-based dance company is performing for their Lincoln Center debut. King is not only a visionary choreographer but also a visionary human. His presence—even via Zoom—looms large. His eyes smile, and his smile runs deep. He calls his works “’thought structures’ created by the manipulation of energies that exist in matter through laws, which govern the shapes and movement directions of everything that exists.” Our conversation was a metaphysical experience.
But King is very much of this world. He was born into a family of civil rights activists in Albany, Georgia. His father, Slater King, became president of the Albany Movement. Though his family had no relation to Martin Luther King, Jr., his father did know him (and Malcolm X too) and the two shared a jail cell more than once. “My parents were willing to die for what they believed in,” he has said. “Their commitment to truth was my tuning fork. What you speak you must live, or else do not speak it. That became my template for how to both behave and create in the world.”
At a young age, King was introduced to yoga and meditation by his father and to dance by his mother. “I loved the way she moved,” he told me. “It was different from the way I saw other people move. They would be on the beat, or on the count, and she would be through it.” He was always moving, always bouncing, making dances in the living room or garage. “Dance was always a love.”
When King saw his first ballet performance, he felt he understood it on a cellular level. “It was so familiar to me.” Soon after, he started ballet training.
King received scholarships to study at the big ballet schools in New York—American Ballet Theatre, the School of American Ballet, the Harkness Ballet. Then he picked up and brought all that classical training and experience to San Francisco where he founded his company Alonzo King LINES Ballet in 1982. Since then, he has won nearly all the awards a choreographer can win, and his work has been commissioned by major dance companies around the world including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, The Royal Swedish Ballet, Ballet Frankfurt, Ballet Béjart, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, Joffrey Ballet, Hong Kong Ballet and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.
I tell you all this because you need to understand the soul of the man to understand the soul of the company. They are one and the same. They are made of hope and fear, of mothers dancing in warm Southern kitchens and fathers saying, “Do what you want to do, Alonzo. This is your life.” They are a melding of Eastern and Western thought and classical forms. Of violence and nonviolence and love.
To see LINES perform is to see........