Exotic Twists to Classic Ballet

Opposites attract--and never more so than in the contemporary classicism of Bay Area choreographer and master teacher Alonzo King. Start with the juxtaposition in a dancer’s body of passionate, whirlwind arms with the sharply articulated legwork and formal step-vocabulary of academic ballet. You can call it a playoff between the contemporary and the traditional, emotion and thought, content and form--but it makes nearly every other kind of modern ballet look old-fashioned or simplistic.

In the performance by King’s 12-member Lines Contemporary Ballet on Friday in Royce Hall at UCLA, this juxtaposition of freedom in the upper limbs with rigor in the lower ones served a choreographic vision no less focused on dynamic oppositions. Using a score by Pharoah Sanders teeming with exotic instrumental textures, “Three Stops on the Way Home” (1997) set soloists against small groups, with a sense of an outsider’s isolation permeating each encounter.

First, the mirror-synchrony and almost courtly manners of Melanie Henderson and Debra Rose placed in high relief the restless urgency of solos by Xavier Ferla, a virtuoso capable of perfect clarity at any velocity. Next came a daunting nine-minute test of stamina for the tireless Chiharu Shibata: initially a solo both elegant and almost liquid in its suppleness followed by her intricate gymnastic interplay with Gregory Dawson, Brian Chung and Yannis Adoniou.

Rose opened the final section, repeatedly teetering on pointe (sometimes on just one pointe) and then collapsing backward, establishing the emphasis on balance issues that soon occupied the whole ensemble. In previous sections, the soloists danced in a different movement style than the groups--the spine-straight Shibata contrasting with the slumping male trio, for instance. Here, however, everyone shared a complex yet loose new style, with Kimberly Okamura given a solo that polished the style for maximum majesty and, soon after, Dawson joining Adoniou for a quasi-competitive duet making that style yield maximum heat.

In stage design, however, “Three Stops on the Way Home” kept to a coolly monochromatic look varied slightly with shifts between cyclorama and drapes, but mostly enforced by the subdued lighting of Robert Wierzel and the black costumes of Robert Rosenwasser and Sandra Woodall: high-necked, sleeveless tops over miniskirts for the women, net T-shirts over tights for the men.

Unfortunately, basic black also dominated King’s “Who Dressed You Like a Foreigner?” (1998), with the same costumers putting the men in shorts this time and using filmy, nude-look tops on the women’s skirtlets. Eventually the lack of color on the stage grew oppressive, as did the overamplification of Zakir Hussain’s voice-and-percussion score. Hussain is a brilliant performer, with his extraordinary playing and singing in the Royce Hall pit adding another dimension of virtuosity to the evening. But the volume levels took his contribution way, way beyond human scale in a six-part piece that never proved more inspired than in its intimate opening and closing duets.

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In the former pas de deux, Henderson and Chung defined “Duty” with flawless rapport through many daring expansions of lyric adagio expression. In the latter, titled “Ma,” King opted for a new approach to Hussain’s music, abandoning abstraction for dance-drama and adopting pale, gauzy, blue-gray leggings or overskirts for Adoniou and Marina Hotchkiss that at last added a speck of color to the dancing as well as evoking the composer’s southern Asia homeland.

The situation, however, scarcely seemed unique to India: a cycle of dependency in which the nurturing female couldn’t get free of her relentlessly needy male. When not nestled in her lap, he coiled about her feet, and not even moments of angry rebellion secured her escape. Mother and child? Certainly, but also plenty of other, more elective relationships.

The weakest of the earlier, black-on-black, sections: “Silence,” a series of tasks for Hotchkiss, Ryan Brooke Taylor, Lauren Porter and Maurya Kerr with plenty of dynamic oppositions but no evident core. King may be unfailingly resourceful as a creator of movement-challenges, but the result can grow enervating without a conceptual through-line.

“Who Dressed You Like a Foreigner?” showed him undertaking a cross-cultural collaboration with ideal openness to new possibilities--but sometimes ricocheting between extremes to the point where only his company’s spectacular expertise kept him from plunging into incoherence.