Irregular pearl, the first work of the evening, alludes to the original meaning of the word “baroque”, whose freedom inspires the choreography. Baroque music in fact encourages extraordinary freedom within its structure, allowing the performer to express his own dynamic creativity by improvising around the bass line. Alonzo King considers the process by which the performer embellishes a musical phrase as a sort of dance: the artist and the music move together in counterpoint, finding moments of contrast and convergence, building a luminescence and singularity into the piece. Baroque aesthetics tends to privilege exuberance and experimentation over the lifelessly correct work of art, and it is therefore the artist’s search that imbues each creation with its own spirit.
The choreography of Alonzo King therefore relies on the same dynamism and openness that we find in Baroque music, infusing new vibrancy into the classical form of ballet and simultaneously revealing the freedom that lies inside of the form itself. His choreography gives the dancers of LINES Ballet a way of transcending virtuosity to achieve a unique beauty, a sense of natural artistry, free of artifice, a luminescence that comes from within.

The second piece in the dyptich that King will present at the Venice Biennale, Rasa, renews his collaboration with tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, a descendant of the legendary musician Ustad Alla Rakha, who has won many awards including a Grammy for the collective album Planet Drum.

“Tabla music” began as dancing music in the courts of northern India in the early decades of the eighteenth century, and since its very origins, the hypnotic intensity and complex rhythms, the enthralling percussive resonance and cyclical repetitions that characterize this music communicate the powerful sensation that it was created to move the body. The collaboration between the Californian choreographer and Zakir Hussain not only carries on an ancient tradition –the tradition of the interdependence between dance and tabla music as an art form– but also represents the contemporary vision of both artists. “The complex rhythmic systems of tabla, like the technical complexity that characterizes western classical ballet, demand the devotion and utter concentration of the artists who practice them; and yet, at the heart of the music and the dance, there is a sense of openness, of arising in joy, of soaring beyond the structures and being held there aloft.” (Alonzo King).