Dance is often thought of as performance art meant to entertain audiences, but for Alonzo King, the co-founder and artistic director of Alonzo King LINES Ballet, it's really a way to communicate complex thoughts. King believes that every single person has an immense power inside them that, when activated, can push against any adversity.
"[Humans] are not weak, whining mortals. They are immortal and have the ability to overcome any and everything if they step into the confidence inherent to them," King says. "Adversity or challenge is to bring out the strength that's inside of us. It's not to beat us up or destroy us, but it's to help us find tools and to discover powers in ourselves that we would not have known before."
For the past 40 years, the San Francisco-based King has made efforts to spread this message as widely as he can. With just 12 dancers in his company, he's able to nimbly schedule performances on some of the world's largest stages, including Venice Biennale, the Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as well as some of the smaller stages — such as Spokane's Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center, where the LINES Ballet performs on March 29.
Choreographing thought-provoking performances may seem like a challenge, but for King the experience has become meditative. He always starts with an idea or concept, which blossoms into certain movements meant to convey it.
"Dance is a language, and it's something we're using to communicate ideas on stage to viewers," he says. "That language wants to be succinct, and it wants to be clear, so I often think the result of my meditation is clarity."
The LINES Ballet's Spokane performance is a tribute to the late Alice Coltrane. The celebrated musician — a spiritual leader and wife of American jazz saxophonist John Coltrane — who died in 2007, was known for her unique approach to jazz as one of the genre's only harpists.
In February 2024, Coltrane's family, alongside a handful of organizations such as the Detroit Jazz Festival, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the New York Historical Society, declared that 2024 and 2025 would be "The Year of Alice." King, who has always adored Alice Coltrane's music, jumped at the opportunity when Coltrane's children asked him to choreograph a performance in her honor.
"Her family wanted to honor their mother, and they reached out to me and said, 'Would you choreograph something?' and I said, 'Yeah, I would be so honored, it's not even a question in my brain,'" King recalls. "I've loved her music since I was a child, and she had such a deep impact on me."
The performance is backed by some of Coltrane's most acclaimed work from her albums Journey in Satchidananda, A Monastic Trio and Ptah, the El Daoud.
King says the performance also pulls from the imaginative storytelling of Maurice Ravel's popular French suiteMa mère l'Oye(Mother Goose). The suite tells such classic fairy tales as Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast; however, instead of solely recreating those tales, he's focusing on the rhetoric and allegorical meanings at the core of the century-old work.
"Take Swan Lake as an example, it's not about a man falling in love with a swan. The metaphysical story is that this young man knows that he's going to inherit and sit on his father's throne, and yet he is reaching and grasping for a white bird, which is unilaterally across planet Earth, a symbol of spirit," King explains. "It means that there is conformity that he can stay with, or he can reach with zeal to the unclear, to the nonmaterialistic world that he sees inside of himself. He's faced with the choice of conformity or going after the dream, something that we all can relate to."
The story of Sleeping Beauty, he says, represents our tendency to wander the world in a somnambulistic state and is really a call to wake up and critically think about the world around us.
"Meaning and metaphor exists in everything, we just have to be willing to wake up to understand it," he says. ♦
Alonzo King LINES Ballet • Sat, March 29 at 7:30 pm • $46-$66 • Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center • 211 E. Desmet Ave. • gonzagaperformingarts.evenue.net
