Alonzo King's Long River High Sky

[MasterKiller]

I would wreck that ballerina. Seriously.

[GeneChing]

Hope you don't mind.

For more reports on this on our forum, see posts 53, 58, 59, 60, 81, 89 & 89.

In print, I did my big review in Long River High Sky: Alonzo King's Lines Ballet and Shaolin Monks in our 2007 November/December Shaolin Special and there's more in the most recent Shaolin Special in The Temple and the Auto Shop

[GeneChing]

Here's the latest from Lines Ballet - no monks this time.

Lines Ballet springs forward with grace, whimsy
Rachel Howard, Chronicle Dance Correspondent
Monday, April 20, 2009

Perhaps a top dance company is not so different from a top restaurant - the key to success is consistency in the kitchen. Home season after home season, Lines Ballet consistently serves up stunningly soul-laid bare dancing, and the spring season that opened Friday is no exception. Brett Conway is a vision of fierce elegance; 6-foot-5 Corey Scott-Gilbert is an outsize wonder of muscular articulation. A new viewer of the company, overwhelmed by these paragons of artistic director Alonzo King's twisting, twining movement style, would probably never suspect that, choreographically, the slate of dances continuing at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through Sunday is not one of King's finest menus.

I run the risk of sounding contrarian by saying that. Opening this program is King's "Signs and Wonders," recently named by the National Endowment for the Arts as an "American Masterpiece" (a crowning the Lines marketing department is missing no opportunity to advertise, more power to them). This longtime Lines admirer can think of half a dozen other King works she'd place before it, but masterpiece or no, "Signs and Wonders" is a beautiful ballet.

The recorded music is traditional African chant and drums, but often in surprising incarnations - one selection with piano backup sounds surprisingly like Motown. Sandra Woodall and Robert Rosenwasser's sleek black costumes look especially lovely in the current revival, and the slightly more classical steps - "Signs and Wonders" was originally created for Dance Theatre of Harlem - spotlight the company's men (Keelan Whitmore in particular) in clear leg-beating jumps.

"Signs and Wonders" has the merit, unusual in a King ballet, of well-edited brevity. The same cannot be said for this season's premiere, "Dust and Light." King's second-tier works tend to look like a series of stitched-together episodes, and in this one the seams show.

The soundtrack of Poulenc and Corelli is patchily put-together. Laurel Keen crawls to otherworldly liturgical singing; dancers climb over one another and pulling each other around a lot by the waists. Ricardo Zayas and David Harvey have a lush duet; Conway and Scott-Gilbert have one that is a study in contrasts, Conway buttery, Scott-Gilbert sharp. Axel Morgenthaler bathes it all in sumptuous golden light; the lighting grid goes up and down and up and down. But unlike King's allegorically powerful best works, no moment of great consequence stands out.

Between the two courses of "Signs and Wonders" and "Dust and Light" is "Splash," set to Nino Rota's boink-zonk cartoon music. It's a rare thing for King: a little ditty of a pas de deux, faintly humorous. With her powerful legs, Meredith Webster was effortlessly majestic in it. I'm glad it's included - a little something zingy on a program that, as usual, leaves the appetite for beauty well fed.

Lines Ballet: Through Sunday. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' Novellus Theater, 700 Howard St., San Francisco. Tickets: $15-$65. (415) 978-2787, www.linesballet.org.