I grew up in the East Bay and yet until now had never seen Alonzo King Lines Ballet perform.  I know who they are, having taken class at their Dance Center and seen photos and advertisements for years.  Yet to the best of my recollection, I’d never been to a performance.

So on-brand is their imagery, however, that upon finally seeing them live, I felt that I had seen them many times.  This is both a good thing—familiarity and the comfort of knowing what to expect—and a bad thing—there was no spark of new discovery.

My preconceived notion of what Lines Ballet would present can be summarized as “bendy people doing bendy things.”  While there was certainly much more than that onstage, it’s also a fair assessment.  The Lines dancers are beautiful.  They have gorgeous bodies, wildly flexible, and it is a delight to watch those bodies in motion. The choreography, however, was not meaty enough for them.  At times it looked so tossed off and unspecific that it took a while to realize that the dancers were bringing tremendous precision and control to the movement.

The movement was barely ballet.  Rooted in the classical, for sure, but not the dominant note.  I found myself repeatedly comparing the performance to the one I attended recently by Company Wayne McGregor.  This too was “cold.”  Choreographically, the dancers didn’t seem to have strong emotional connections to each other, which made it hard for me to become invested.  Then, there was the length.  Clocking in at 75 minutes without intermission, Sutra was long.  There was a point when I thought the piece was ending.  The whole company was onstage, and the lighting and movement was pointing toward a winding down.  I wish Sutra had ended then because my reaction would have been different.  By the time the curtain came down, I was aware only of the length.  This is a shame.  Had the piece ended at, say, the 55-minute mark, I might have had more positive things to say.  The length ultimately eclipsed that.  To borrow a term from a friend, it felt self-indulgent.

The other 700 people in the audience would disagree with me.  Many people leapt to their feet the moment it ended, and I heard fragments of exclamations around me.  The woman seated directly in front of me said, “Oh, it makes me want to go back to India!”  The music, which was Indian, was very good and very interesting, alternately instrumental and vocal.  Unique musical collaborations are a hallmark of Lines Ballet, and a major part of the draw for audiences.  It’s certainly a treat to have the composers there, performing their own work.  It adds another element, and a key one for Lines Ballet, taking the performance beyond being simply a dance show and into the realm of a complete theatrical experience. Lines is to be applauded for the diversity they bring to ballet—diversity in nearly every sense of the word, from the performers to the movement to the music.  This was their 35^th anniversary season; the company has become a beloved part of the San Francisco community.  Seeing this performance has piqued my curiosity:  what will Alonzo King create for San Francisco Ballet as part of the Unbound festival?  Will it look like Lines?  We’ll find out soon!

Alonzo King Lines Ballet:  Sutra, with Zakir Hussain & Sabir Khan
April 13, 2018, at 7:30 pm at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts