Dance : Lines Breaks New Ground

In a decade of Bay Area activity, Alonzo King and his Lines Contemporary Ballet have managed to please everyone from classical paragon Natalia Makarova to maverick modernist William Forysythe with a style founded on the most radical innovations of the 20th Century.

King seems to accept the new frontiers of Balanchine’s “Agon” and “Episodes” as home turf and isn’t shy about adding a personal signature to neoclassicism through vocabularies drawn from his African-American heritage.

The first “Black Choreographers” festival gave Southland audiences a taste of King’s intense, sophisticated abstractions and the Joffrey Ballet soon acquired two of his works. Now a 10th-anniversary tour is providing more sustained exposure to both King’s choreography and to his multiracial, chamber-size company.

On Friday, Lines appeared at UC San Diego, presenting a three-part program in Mandeville Auditorium, a cavernous hall with disastrous sight lines for dance.

Each piece explored a kind of lyric angularity, with “Without Wax” (1990) adding a swirl of arms to reflect the high, skittering strings recurring in the score by Sofia Gubaidulina. This motif made the dancers look nearly airborne as they surged through nervous, twisty sequences colored by specific emotional focuses even at maximum velocity.

Midway through, Summer Lee Rhatigan and Gregory Dawson danced to music by Martinu--but though their duet began with a courtly hand-kiss, it defied conventional ballet-romance by resolving in a side-by-side separateness, the dancers linked through shared motion rather than touch.

“Gurdjieff Piano Music” (1992) filled the stage with smoke, golden light and group movement carrying tantalizing ritual implications. Early on, for example, Dawson and Eric Thome carried and guided Katherine Warner, like acolytes at a wedding or a sacrifice. She, however, drifted between them as if dazed, oblivious to everything but the beam of light beckoning her forward.

Happily, despite its air of mystery, the piece avoided philosophical platitudes in favor of exploring the movement possibilities of its exotic structures. Unusual patterns of support, constant shifts of speed, level, direction and scale plus evocations of non-Western modes of dance all proved major priorities.

For his brand-new “Compelling Geological Evidence,” King literally grounded his company, de-emphasizing pointe-work lifts and jumps in favor of inventive earth-bound dancing appropriate to a ballet about shifting land-masses and our growing fascination with the Big One in our future.

The final section even introduced a floodlight-helmeted scientist measuring dancers and stage in the midst of an inexorably rhythmic ensemble set to perhaps the most insistent passage of Donald Fontowitz’s energetically hissing, chugging and thumping soundscore.

Lots of unorthodox hopping steps and body-folding here, with the boldly original duet for Nora Heiber and Brian Chung beginning in something like academic classicism but terminating in the outer reaches of gymnastic modernism. In a sense, it graphed the course of ballet itself in our time.

King understands the traditions of his art and builds upon them an authentically contemporary style. The number of ballet choreographers who live--and create--solely in the present are so few that one of his distinction must be accounted the artistic equivalent of a shooting star.

* Lines Contemporary Ballet also performs Tuesday at UC Riverside and Thursday at UC Santa Barbara.