April might be the cruelest month for some folks, but the first full blast of spring brings bounty and joy to Alonzo King. The renowned San Francisco choreographer not only returns to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for an April 5-14 run with his LINES Ballet featuring the world premiere of a new dance set to a score of African-American spirituals, “Spring.” His work is also a major presence across the Bay where the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Cal Performances residency includes the Bay Area premiere of his ballet “Following the Subtle Current Upstream.”
Set to music by tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, a frequent King collaborator, Miguel Frasconi and Miriam Makeba, the piece has traveled the world with Chicago’s Hubbard Street Dance and the Ailey company, which commissioned and premiered the dance in 2000. For King, it’s more than gratifying that “a work created 20 years ago is still vibrant and fresh as hell,” he said.
Created with AAADT Artistic Director Judith Jamison’s sole imperative that King create a work to “have the dancers move differently,” he’s kept the ballet in the LINES repertory because the challenging piece “grows artists, as it was intended to do,” he said. “Meredith Webster stages ballets of mine all over, and it’s amazing the way she works with people. It’s joyous that something is going to have longevity and survive after you’ve gone.”
A conversation with King is always something of an adventure. More than passionate about music, he experiences it as creative fuel inseparable from the need to set bodies in motion. Philosophical and curious, he resists questions that seek to dissect the creative process, but often reveals deep ties to the music that inspires his choreography.
The coincidental timing of the world premiere of “Spring” and the AAADT’s annual residency at UC Berkeley, which includes Ailey’s masterly 1960 suite set to spirituals and gospel “Revelations.” It will be in six of the seven performances and helps to set up a fascinating dialogue between the dance makers. For Ailey (1931-1989), “Revelations” drew on what longtime AAADT dancer Renee Robinson called his “blood memory” of growing up in Rogers, Texas.
King’s “Spring” is set to spirituals sung by Bernice Johnson Reagon, best known as the founder and guiding spirit of the all-women African-American cappela ensemble Sweet Honey In the Rock. But he encountered her much earlier, as a wide-open eight-year-old in Albany, Georgia witnessing the civil rights movement accelerate to ramming-speed in 1960.
“She was about 17 and that voice was just incredible,” said King, whose father was a leader of sit-in movement that break out at Albany State College in 1960, where the pre-Reagon Johnson was a freshman. “Years ago I wanted to work with her, but this was the first opportunity to make it happen.”
He’s fascinated by the foundational role of spirituals in the evolution of the new identity forged by Africans brought to the colonies as slaves. A repository for spirituality, a vehicle for coded messages, and a communal celebration in the face of vicious dehumanization, spirituals “were the earliest recorded sound of that transition, before blues, jazz, and gospel,” King said. “It’s fascinating that these brilliant people were brought here and had to disguise their intelligence. They could not practice their languages or culture, and yet through this clash of cultures they emerged into a society drenched in African ideas.”
Much like blues songs are often misconstrued as primarily an expression of lamentation rather than a communal ritual about overcoming life’s vicissitudes, King sees spirituals as “a secret key, an escape route somehow,” he said. “People think they’re sorrowful songs, but African-American spirituals are about hope, no matter how dark it is. That’s why I called the ballet ‘Spring.’ We don’t drown in this darkness that seems insurmountable. There is a way out.”
The YBCA program also features King’s San Francisco Ballet-commissioned “The Collective Agreement” set to pianist Jason Moran’s newly recorded score featuring the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra and his 2013 Bach-inspired “Concerto for Two Violins.” In the case of “The Collective Agreement,” King is reclaiming work that’s been performed by ballets with their own orchestras.
“I wanted Lines to be able to do it too, and that means we had to go to Lithuania and work with National Orchestra with Jason and myself,” King said, referring to the renowned jazz pianist and composer with whom he’s collaborated on numerous ballets. “The players were brilliantly skilled and really wanted the work to shine. When I do set works on other ballet companies, I like to keep it open that I can do them with my own company.”
Since the Community Music Center’s remodeled and refurbished Mission campus fully reopened last month a spate of concerts has inaugurated the concert hall. It’s a family affair on Friday, when multi-instrumentalist, producer and composer Maestro Curtis, who created and launched the school’s Black Music Studies Program, headlines a free triple bill with his Curtis Family C-notes, trumpeter Ryan Ancheta’s quartet, and The Sam Chase, a San Francisco band led by the titular guitarist, songwriter and singer.
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