Ballet company celebrates 40th anniversary with Wharton Center dance concert
Everything in our world is made up of lines. It is something that connects us, gives us commonality. It’s that mathematical concept that drove Alonzo King to name his ballet company LINES when he founded it in 1982.
His company — a ballet troupe that honors classical forms with their linear, mathematical and geometrical principles— is coming to East Lansing’s Wharton Center on Thursday as part of its 40th anniversary tour.
The 7:30 p.m. Cobb Great Hall performance will feature a new 65-minute work, “Deep River,” that melds Black spirituals and dance. The music was arranged by jazz luminary Jason Moran and vocals are provided by Lisa Fischer. Fischer was a background singer for such artists as Luther Vandross, The Rolling Stones, Tina Turner and Nine Inch Nails. She’s won Grammy awards as a recording artist and appeared in “20 Feet From Stardom."
Moran is a jazz pianist, composer, educator and the head of jazz at the Kennedy Center.
Fischer won’t be live at the Wharton Center, but dance company founder and artistic director King described her as “brilliant, with one of the most remarkable voices in the world.”
King has dedicated his life to dance as a performer, teacher and choreographer. He describes his dedication to the art as a form of discipline in which you use an anvil to hammer out your character. It’s a practice in which the honeymoon ends early.
“Then the real relationship begins,” King said. “It’s about self-reform. It’s no small endeavor to keep a dance company alive for 40 years. You’re building muscles, you’re developing qualities of perseverance, you’re being fanatically positive. These come from being in a long-term relationship. You commit to something, you see it through and you continue on, because that is what you chose to give your life to.”
The San Francisco-based dance company has a professional company that tours the world and a school in which they teach new dancers to embrace the lifestyle and art of ballet. Each year they reach more than 50,000 audience members.
King has noticed a difference between European and American audiences that he traces to school and educational experiences. In Europe, art and dance are still very much a part of the curriculum for students of all ages so audiences there feel confident in engaging the work, in talking about it and in challenging it. Americans tend to be more hesitant, waiting for people to tell them how to interpret things, something King resists doing.
“My position is that when people are observing art, they have to relax and feel,” King said. “I am averse to telling anyone what they should experience, only that they should experience. If I were to tell you about an orange and its bright, snappiness and its color, the shape of it, how it feels, its texture — it’s all abstract until you yourself experience orange.”
He points out when it comes to sports, no one questions what the game means or why it has the rules that it does. But with the lack of free arts education in K-12, people aren’t as comfortable experiencing or talking about art.
“People grow up with a mistrust of art or they don’t have the confidence to talk about their experience,” King said. “I say it is available to anyone who is living and is conscious. You’re going to have (your own) thoughts and impressions and feelings.”
It’s why he encourages people to come to the dance concert at MSU, especially for those who are recovering from the trauma of the Feb. 13 shooting.
“It is absorbing to see someone on stage who is in the moment, fully concentrated, with no distractions, embodying ideas,” King said. “That is mesmerizing in our distracted minds with phones in front of our faces non-stop. And with the restlessness and so much brutality in the world — to see human beings who have devoted their lives to something, and for the large part are not making tons of money and believe in what they are doing — you see them living their truth. It is, for me, astonishing.”
If you go
What: Alonzo King LINES Ballet “Deep River”
When: Thursday, Feb. 23
Where: Cobb Great Hall, Wharton Center, MSU
Tickets: $30 and up
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Ballet company celebrates 40th anniversary with Wharton Center concert
