Alonzo
King’s Lines Ballet opened this week at Jacob’s Pillow and the audience, all of us, were wild
with
enthusiasm. I have been waiting a long time to stand for the right
reason
– not merely to see beyond the person in front of me nor to acquiesce
to
what has become the current zero-standard of indiscriminate
theatre-going. No.
The attending ovation that greeted the final curtain on Thursday had
been
simmering and percolating all evening.
King
has gathered a company of the finest dancers
that I can imagine to do his work. There are five men and four women
and each
of them is unique and, at the same time, each is the embodiment of
ensemble
member. I can’t recall having seen a company with such clear and
unselfconscious inter-connection. And more than this, the choreography
transcends any easy label, not because King invents movement that is
wholly
unfamiliar or that he insists on defining a stage language unlike
others we
have experienced. Rather, King pays tribute to classical forms and adds
his signature
riffs. At the same time, he appears to have obliterated gender
assignments, and
I don’t mean that he is politically inspired to comment on gender or
sexuality.
King’s
choreography in both pieces, Migration and Rasa, is as sensual an experience as I have
had in any dance performance.
And this happens because the dancers, male and female, play off of each
other’s
steps, combinations and pairings. Over and over, I was struck by the
body
language that consistently avoided male/female assignment and the ease
with
which the men and women asserted themselves without reliance on a
preconceived
image of gender behaviour or attitude.
Each
piece featured a pas de deux, and each was
breath-stoppingly exquisite. Body shape, interaction and playful
embrace of the
human form were enough to make the audience almost giddy with verbal
responses.
That level of engagement is rare, of course, and the pay-off was that
the
company continued after each of these sections to lift us to even
greater
emotional peaks.
In
her opening curtain comments, Executive
Director Ella Baff
mentioned
that Alonzo King has just been awarded this year’s Jacob’s Pillow Award
for
Creativity. I wasn’t aware that there is such an award, but then seeing
his
work immediately following this announcement, I couldn’t imagine how
King could
not be honoured in this way.
Jacob’s
Pillow continues to push us beyond where
we might have thought it possible to go. And the Pillow itself, so
magical an
environment and inspiring a community, roots us in the notion that
dance exists
to transcend mere performance by leading us to places deep within our
hearts,
minds and souls.