OTTAWA, April 24, 2013 — Making its anticipated NAC debut, Alonzo King LINES Ballet presents a double-bill including an innovative reimagining of Scheherazade. Founder, Artistic Director and choreographer, Alonzo King fuses ancient Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic stories with ballet filtered through a contemporary lens. In Resin, the company gloriously interprets rhythm and melody in a suite of solos, duets, and ensemble dances.  Alonzo King LINES Ballet takes to the Southam Hall stage at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Saturday, May 4, 2013. The matinee was added due to popular demand.

Alonzo King LINES Ballet is unique among American ballet companies, gaining notice the world over for its genre-bending, innovative contributions to 21st-century ballet. Recently celebrating its landmark 30th anniversary season, the company is guided by a distinctly global artistic vision. The company’s works draw on a diverse set of deeply rooted cultural traditions, imbuing classical ballet with new expressive potential. In Scheherazade, the original Rimsky-Korsakov score, adapted for Western and Persian instruments by tabla master Zakir Hussain, heightens the work’s exotic dreaminess. Musical selections include Sephardic melodies, and archival synagogue recordings from Turkey and Morocco.

As Artistic Director, King actively develops original new works with other artists from diverse disciplines and cultures. King’s visionary choreography connects audiences to a profound sense of shared humanity —of vulnerability and tenderness, but also of furious abandon and exhilarating freedom. “My intention was to grapple with the metaphysical meaning behind Scheherazade and present that meaning in its essence. Scheherazade is the symbol of the savior. She weaves tales not to save her own life, but to save humanity from its unending retributive response to injury.”

Scheherazade (2009)
Choreography: Alonzo King
Music: Zakir Hussain according to Rimsky Korsakov

Duration: 47 minutes

ABOUT SCHEHERAZADE

Scheherazade is a timeless romantic fable about the world's most famous storyteller, interpreted through choreographer Alonzo King's distinctive artistic lens. In 2009, King was commissioned by the Monaco Dance Forum to create a modern version of Scheherazade to inaugurate the centenary of the storied Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. This Scheherazade honours Ballets Russes founder Sergei Diaghilev’s spirit of cutting-edge artistic collaboration, immersing audiences in a luminescent and richly textured world. Emotionally charged and visually stunning, Scheherazade is illuminating and entirely new, with a brilliant, shimmering backdrop and simple, but ravishing, costumes. The choreography is elegant and joyous, propelling King’s dancers to the heights of their impressive capabilities in a display of breathtaking and stylish virtuosity.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's thrilling score (1888, based on One Thousand and One Nights, sometimes known as The Arabian Nights) was updated and reinterpreted by Zakir Hussain to include Western with Persian instruments. In addition to the violin, harp and cello, the score incorporates traditional 5000 year old instruments such as the rubab and nay, the Uzbek doira, and the Indian tabla.

Scheherazade was honoured with four 2012 Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (San Francisco) for Outstanding Achievement in Music/Sound/Text, Set Design, Lighting Design, and Costume Design.

 

Resin (2011)
Choreography by: Alonzo King
Music: Jordi Savall and field recordings of Sephardic music

Duration: 50 minutes

ABOUT RESIN

A dancer presses his body into the outline of a cone of light; the halo lifts upwards, a shofar sounds its lament, and Resin begins, moving from intimate duets to the flashing, barely visible footwork of a quartet of dancers. Resin's cohesive suite of dance for solos, duos, and ensembles is almost an hour long, and it is spellbinding throughout. Resin draws from the rich traditions of Sephardic and Jewish culture to weave a tapestry of movement and sounds as full-bodied as its source material. Interested in “singing that is not obsessed with skill but proceeds from the heart,” King uses vocal and instrumental music, prayer, and recorded lessons in the Hebrew alphabet punctuated with human breath and the distant rustle of pages turning. The soundscape includes rare archival field recordings interwoven with Judeo-Spanish songs by early-music artist Jordi Savall. It's spiritual and secular, traditional and contemporary, instrumental and a cappella. Alonzo King stirs emotion through the extraordinary physicality of his dancers as the stage is transformed into a shimmering and timeless landscape; consuming and exhilarating. The ballet vocabulary, is passed through a filter that seems to elongate the extensions, add spring to the leaps, and articulate the frequent moves into a modified passé. The aplomb of the dancers is superb. In the finale, rivulets of golden sand cascade downwards in streams of light, bathing dancers in its gritty warmth. As the curtain falls, tiny pellets of hardened resin 'tears' continue to pour from the heavens, suggesting a kind of earthy immortality.

 

ABOUT ALONZO KING LINES BALLET

San Francisco-based Alonzo King LINES Ballet is a celebrated contemporary ballet company that has been guided since 1982 by the unique artistic vision of Alonzo King. He understands ballet as a science – founded on universal, geometric principles of energy and evolution – and continues to develop a new language of movement from its classical forms and techniques. Alonzo King’s visionary choreography, brought to life by the extraordinary LINES Ballet dancers, is renowned for connecting audiences to a profound sense of shared humanity. LINES Ballet’s global tours allow the company to share its vision of transformative, revelatory dance worldwide. The first full-length film of the company’s performances was recently released in Europe, inaugurating Alonzo King LINES Ballet’s 30th Anniversary season. The company shares its vision of transformative, revelatory dance through performances and outreach activities worldwide. It also cultivates the gifts of developing dancers through the Alonzo King LINES Ballet Training Program, Summer Program, the BFA Program in Dance with Dominican University of California, and the Alonzo King LINES Dance Center.

 

ABOUT ALONZO KING

Alonzo King has been commissioned to create works for companies throughout the world, including the Swedish Royal Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, North Carolina Dance Theatre, and Washington Ballet. He has worked extensively in opera, television, and film, and has choreographed works for prima ballerina Natalia Makarova and film star Patrick Swayze. Mr. King has also collaborated with artists such as actor Danny Glover, legendary jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, and the Shaolin Monks of China. Renowned for his skill as a teacher, Mr. King has been the guest Ballet Master for The National Ballet of Canada, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, San Francisco Ballet, Ballet Rambert, and others. Not only does King's visionary choreography constantly attract high praise from audiences and critics alike, but from fellow choreographers as well. In 2012, Alonzo King garnered the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Beckett, Massachusetts.

 

Master Class
Friday, May 3rd, 2013. 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
NAC Dance presents a Public Ballet Class with Arturo Fernandez, Ballet Master of Alonzo King LINES Ballet.

Thanks to the generous support of the Embassy of the United States of America, Alonzo King LINES Ballet will be teaching a free dance master class for local Ottawa and Gatineau students.

Rehearsal Hall B, National Arts Centre, 53 Elgin Street, Ottawa
(Enter by Stage Door).

For intermediate level ballet students and dancers (aged 14 and up). As space is limited, you must register in advance with Kirsten Andersen, Dance Outreach Coordinator. Email: kirsten.andersen@nac-cna.ca.

SCHEHERAZADE PRESS QUOTES
Scheherazade is a sustained study of Orientalist mood, sensuous and sensual, with men in sarongs and everyone charmingly flamboyant."
Alastair Macaulay, The New York Times

"Alonzo Kings LINES Ballet presents a stunning program with Resin and Scheherazade. King’s marriage of new and old, classic and contemporary, East and West, make Scheherazade unlike any other ballet. This company uses classic ballet technique to create exquisite images on stage unlike any other. You may never think of a line the same way again."
Stephanie Sirabian, bachtrach

RESIN PRESS QUOTES
"Alonzo King adds one more jewel to his collection of multicultural movement explorations ... glows like a garnet. The dancing by the 14-member troupe summons superlatives with the sublime ease that is LINES' trademark. ... eye-popping moments and sensual grounding."
Allan Ulrich, San Francisco Chronicle, October 18, 2011

"Resin is possibly one of the most dramatic, original and well done pieces of choreography I have EVER SEEN. Alonzo King’s approach to movement is genius. His vocabulary is classical but he shifts, sculpts, molds it to create his own unique language. Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet is a world-class company at the height of its talents. It must be seen to be truly believed for no amount of words can ever do it justice!"
Darrell Wood, nycdancestuff, May 12, 2012

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For more information please contact:
Clara Wicke
Marketing and Communications Officer, Dance/ Agente de marketing et de communication, Danse
National Arts Centre/Centre national des Arts
(613) 947-7000 X379
clara.wicke@nac-cna.ca