The Alonzo King Lines Ballet is returning to West Palm Beach this coming week with a performance that will feature two recent works by its founder: Ode to Alice Coltrane and Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose).
Just returning from a five-week tour of France, this celebrated San Francisco-based contemporary dance company is recognized for its artistic integrity and its brilliant dancers. Choreographer King merges classical ballet with contemporary innovation and diverse cultural traditions in the dances he creates for his Lines Ballet.
Adji Cissoko, who has danced with Lines since 2014, was recently named associate artistic director of the company. She said the two works on the Kravis are well-paired and serve as wonderful contrasts to each other in music and choreographic style.
Cissoko said King gives his dancers the responsibility to make choices about how to interpret their movements so that they never get bored, but he also requires that each movement be a different experience.
“So, it really keeps it fresh and exciting and new,” Cissoko said. “And with that now in my new position [as associate artistic director] I think I also have that responsibility to pass that on to the dancers — pushing them, reminding them, that there’s more choices even they thought. ‘Oh, that felt good’ … keep pushing yourself further.”
Cissoko finds it an exciting challenge to move from one work to the other especially because they are so very different. In Mother Goose, the duet she performs is on pointe and has two distinct parts. The first half is slow and dreamlike, and the second half is a complete switch where she becomes a fun caricature with very exaggerated movement that is “over the top,” she said.
King choreographed Ma mère l’Oye to the well-known suite by the French composer Maurice Ravel, written as a piano duet in 1910 and orchestrated by the composer the following year. Later in 1911, he expanded it into a ballet score, adding two movements in the beginning and separating the original five movements with four new interludes.
In his choreography, King doesn’t try to retell the traditional fairy tales. Instead, he explores the allegorical as well as metaphysical meanings behind the nursery rhymes and fairy tales.
The other work on the Kravis program is Ode to Alice Coltrane, set to some of the jazz musician’s best-known works. King has been inspired by the music of Alice Coltrane ever since he was a child. In fact, one of his very first pieces of choreography 40 years ago was set to her music.
Cissoko said whenever she performs Ode to Alice Coltrane, she particularly looks forward to performing her last solo, “Going Home.” Even though she is classically trained in ballet, she loves to dance to jazz and she finds this particular solo to be very spiritual for her. It is a long solo that is extremely physically challenging to get through but every time, she enjoys “the push to get to the bliss.”
Cissoko hopes that “Going Home” will serve as a reminder for the audience that when we go through a hard phase, we have to push to get through that hard time so that we can get to where we want to be.
If you go
The Alonzo King Lines Ballet performs at 7:30 pm Wednesday, March 11, at the Kravis Center, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. For tickets, visit kravis.org or call the box office at 561-832-7469.