Jaime Robles has previously written in the San Francisco Bay Area, including for the San Francisco Classical Voice. Also a poet, she has written song lyrics and librettos for several one-act operas, including Inferno (music by Peter Josheff), staged in 2009 by San Francisco Cabaret Opera, and Vladimir in Butterfly Country (music by Anne Callaway), staged in 2012.
“Your love affair with ballet, your time with ballet, is short,” explains Welsh about his ballet Bespoke, “Eventually you lay down, and dance keeps moving. It’s a bittersweet thing.”
A projection of green sky above shadowy mountains hovered behind their duet, and the curved bodies of the other dancers moved, barely visible, in the darkness of downstage.
Abstract ballet always asks the question of meaning, and Alonzo King Lines Ballet is one of the few companies that answers that question with existential exactness.
The program presented excerpts from five new works in a riotously diverse selection, from an adaptation of the unfinished Fitzgerald novel, The Last Tycoon, to Death of a Playboy, an imaginary reenactment of Hugh Hefner’s funeral.
A cube hangs suspended at an angle and Ramirez, harnessed to a line above the stage, floats above it, fulfilling the promise of dance and the human desire to escape gravity – to fly in angelic weightlessness.
The body as it moves, in all its human vulnerability, is never free of emotion. Wendy Whelan and Brian Brooks collaborate on Some of A Thosand Words, performed in San Francisco.
