Alonzo King LINES Ballet

Unlike choreographers who deconstruct classical technique, King keeps its core vocabulary - pointe work, extension, turnout - largely intact, and instead strips away the narrative and dramatic conventions built up around it, treating the line of the body itself as the subject of the work. LINES Ballet has built much of its repertory in close musical collaboration with artists from outside the Western concert tradition, including tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, and the Kronos Quartet, letting the specific rhythmic and melodic character of each score shape the choreography.

Biophony, built around field recordings of the natural world collected by bioacoustician Bernie Krause, is characteristic of King's approach to scoring: in the score, created by composer Richard Blackford with Krause, birdsong, insect sound, and other environmental recordings carry the rhythmic and melodic structure, with only light accents of percussion, strings, and winds, and the choreography is built in direct response to those natural sound textures.

LINES Ballet's training arm has grown from summer programs into a full BFA offered jointly with Dominican University of California, making the company one of relatively few contemporary ballet organizations to run a degree-granting conservatory alongside its performing wing. That structure lets King's specific approach to abstracted classical technique be taught systematically to dancers training toward a professional career, rather than passed down only to those who join the company itself.