Alonzo King LINES Ballet Celebrates 35 Years

Alonzo King LINES Ballet, the internationally celebrated contemporary ballet company, is pleased to announce the performance schedule for its 35th Anniversary year, which kicks off with the world premiere of a new ballet with King's longtime collaborator Zakir Hussain, April 6-15 and culminates with a world premiere collaboration with the Grammy Award-winning Kronos Quartet, October 5-14, 2018. Since its founding in 1982, Alonzo King LINES Ballet has been guided by the unique artistic vision of Alonzo King.

Collaborating with noted composers, musicians, and visual artists from around the world, King creates works that draw on a diverse set of deeply rooted cultural traditions, channeling the powerful understanding that ballet is part art, part science, and part primal intuition. His choreography, brought to life by the extraordinary LINES Ballet dancers, is branded with artistic excellence and bold imagination and shows us the extraordinary way that art connects us to each other and the world around us. For more than three decades, the conceptual design, production, aesthetic and artistic direction of each project has been shaped in collaboration with Creative Director and LINES Ballet Co-Founder Robert Rosenwasser. World Premiere Collaboration with Zakir Hussain

April 6-15, 2018, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Friday, April 6 at 7:30pm Saturday, April 7 - Gala Peformance Sunday, April 8, 6pm Wednesday, April 11 to Saturday, April 14, 7:30pm Sunday, April 15, at 2 pm and 6 pm Alonzo King LINES Ballet kicks off its 35th Anniversary season with the world premiere of a new work with King's longtime collaborator Zakir Hussain.

For over twenty years King and Hussain have been pushing the boundaries of creative expression together. A National Treasure Hussain will be performing live on stage with sarangi master Sabir Khan. Hussain is a classical tabla virtuoso from India widely considered a chief architect of the contemporary world music movement. His complex rhythmic systems naturally partner with King's choreography and illustrate the continuity between transcendental Eastern thinking and Western ballet's classical forms and techniques. "This project will serve as a celebration of the long-standing interdependence of dance and tabla music as art forms," said King. "It will also honor the evolution of my two-decade long partnership with Zakir."

RJ Muna | Alonzo King LINES Ballet Photography Exhibition Through May 3, 2018, SFO Airport San Francisco-based artist RJ Muna has been photographing dance in the Bay Area for over twenty years and has been collaborating with Alonzo King LINES Ballet since 2009. Muna's relationship with the company has created an understanding of King's artistic point of view, which allows him to capture the authenticities of King's choreography on film. This creative collaboration has influenced the artists on both sides of the camera and has inspired a synthesis between movement and still image. In celebration of the 35th Anniversary, a selection of RJ Muna's captivating photographs of LINES Ballet will be on display at SFO Airport through May 3rd.

Unbound Festival - San Francisco Ballet April 20 - May 3, 2018, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Alonzo King creates a new work for San Francisco Ballet, one of the world's oldest and most prestigious dance companies, as part of its highly anticipated Unbound Festival. Entitled The Collective Agreement, this world premiere ballet is set to a commissioned score by jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran. In The Collective Agreement King explores relationships and dualities - movement and sound, tension and ease, romantic and classical ideals.

Biophony performance at COAL + ICE Festival September 13, 2018, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco In 2015 Alonzo King, natural soundscape artist Bernie Krause and composer Richard Blackford teamed up to create Biophony, a work built around a kaleidoscope of unique animal soundscapes. This work will be revived for COAL + ICE in September, a three-week festival of art and music focusing on the consequences of climate change and the creative dialogue around how to solve this complex issue. The festival coincides with Governor Jerry Brown's Global Climate Action Summit. Biophony uses Krause's recordings of wild environments from the Central African Republic to the Alaskan tundra, collected over four decades and arranged by composer Richard Blackford, as the soundscape for Alonzo King's choreography.

Through-LINES: The Art of Ballet @836M September 20, 2018 - January 17, 2019, Gallery 835M, San Francisco Gallery 836M, located in San Francisco's historic Jackson Square neighborhood, presents Through-LINES: The Art of Ballet, a new exhibition honoring the art of ballet as a contemporary, multimedia, living art form. This collaborative exhibition will focus on LINES Ballet's artistic collaborators, and the company's aesthetic evolution over the last 35 years. The show emphasizes the many artists that have contributed to LINES Ballet's remarkable history - from costumes and set design to photography, lighting and soundscapes. Gallery guests will be immersed in the visual, audio and tactical beauty that is LINES Ballet.

World Premiere with Kronos Quartet October 5-14, 2018, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco The company closes out its 35th Anniversary with a world premiere collaboration between two San Francisco icons: Alonzo King LINES Ballet & the Kronos Quartet.

For over four decades Kronos has combined a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to continually reimagine the string quartet experience. Kronos has become one of the world's most influential ensembles, performing thousands of concerts, releasing more than 60 recordings, collaborating with many of the world's most intriguing and accomplished composers and performers, and commissioning over 900 works and arrangements for string quartet. This world premiere collaboration marks the first time Alonzo King and Kronos Quartet will work together. Throughout the 35th Anniversary year, Alonzo King LINES Ballet will continue its robust touring schedule, which takes the company to Austria, Hungary, Paris, Boston, Minneapolis, Dallas, New York and Vail.

More information about Alonzo King LINES Ballet and its 35th Anniversary is at www.linesballet.org.

"The term LINES alludes to all that is visible in the phenomenal world. There is nothing that is made or formed without line. Lines are in our fingerprints, the shapes of our bodies, constellations, geometry. It implies genealogical connection, progeny and spoken word. It addresses direction, communication, and design. A line of thought. A boundary or eternity. A melodic line. From vibration or dot to dot it is the visible organization of what we see."