Alonzo King LINES Ballet is pleased to present a groundbreaking new collaboration bringing together a trio of celebrated artists: choreographer Alonzo King, architect Christopher Haas, and percussionist Mickey Hart. This new work will have itsworld premiere during Alonzo King LINES Ballet’s 2011 Spring Home season, at the Novellus Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, April 15-24, 2011.
King, Haas and Hart join together to create a new piece that explores our relationship with space – physical space and infinite space. The original soundscore by the Grammy-award winning Hart, is based on his recent collaborations with Nobel Laureate George Smoot, draws on the harmonics of the cosmos itself, gathering light waves from the vibrations of heavenly bodies and converting them into layers of sound. Architect Haas, formerly a collaborator with world-renown Swiss architects Herzog &de Meuron, and one of the lead architects of San Francisco’s MH deYoung Museum, has created an interactive built environment, partnering the dancers with transformable architectural surroundings crafted from inexpensive, ordinarily overlooked materials such as recycled cardboard and elastic chord, his sets strike an intriguing kinetic balance between linear and organic forms, and the extraordinary dancers of Alonzo King LINES Ballet grace the stage with incomparable physical artistry.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet’s collaboration with architect Christopher Haas and percussionist Mickey Hart is only the latest in a long history of collaborations with artists both local and global. Most recently, it collaborated with the San Francisco Opera Adler Fellows. Other collaborators include New York-based jazz pianist Jason Moran and legendary jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders; India’s national treasure, tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain; Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock; actor Danny Glover; Japanese classical composer Somei Satoh; celebrated Polish composer Pavel Syzmanski; and Nubian oud master Hamza El Din. One of the Company’s great successes was bringing sixteen musicians and dancers from the Lobaye Forest of Central African Republic—the BaAka—for the People of the Forest project. Alonzo King LINES Ballet has also received accolades for its collaborative project with the Shaolin monks, an unprecedented synthesis of Eastern and Western classical forms that intertwines martial arts and ballet.