The Stage

Alonzo King Lines Ballet: Dust and Light/Rasa

Published Wednesday 1 September 2010 at 18:00 by Natasha Tripney

This double bill marks the long-awaited UK debut of the acclaimed San Francisco dance company, Alonzo King Lines Ballet.

King’s choreography merges the languages of ballet and contemporary dance, encompassing both the pure and precise, with the animalistic, primal and potent.

The first piece on the bill, Dust and Light, is the more delicate and ethereal of the two, a flowing, floating piece set to a mixture of baroque and choral music by Arcangelo Corelli and Francis Poulenc. It’s relatively gentle and dreamlike in tone until the final dazzling sunburst of light and movement.

This is followed by Rasa, perhaps the more striking of the two works. King’s third collaboration with the Grammy-winning Zakir Hussain, the piece is set to tabla music which is performed live by Hussain and Kala Ramnath. In this powerful piece a series of recognisably human, intimate gestures, are contrasted with dynamic group sequences.

The main duet is intensely physical, with a pair of dancers, Laurel Keen and David Harvey, tumbling and clambering over one another, manipulating one another’s limbs.

As the music becomes more percussive and insistent the piece opens up, adding layer upon layer, evolving. The company is honed and accomplished, the dancers’ bodies gloriously sculptural under the lights.

Both pieces are captivating in their own way, with the latter piece just having the edge in terms of its fusion of performance and music and its sheer visual spectacle.