✦ Origins ✦
Alonzo King founded LINES Ballet in San Francisco in 1982, building the company around his own choreographic voice rather than a shared repertory drawn from other choreographers, which remains unusual among major contemporary ballet companies. The company later established a training program, now offered as a BFA in partnership with Dominican University of California, extending King's approach into dancer education as well as performance.
Artistic Identity
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.
Notable Work
Biophony, built around field recordings of the natural world collected by bioacoustician Bernie Krause, is characteristic of King's approach to scoring: rather than commissioning conventional instrumental music, the piece lets birdsong, insect sound, and other environmental recordings function as the score's rhythmic and melodic structure, with the choreography built in direct response to those non-musical sound textures.
Training the Next Generation
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.
Why It Matters
LINES Ballet demonstrates a different route into contemporary ballet than Forsythe's or McGregor's deconstruction of technique: keeping classical vocabulary essentially intact while reinventing what it is used to say, and who it is built in collaboration with.