Choreographer Alonzo King Unveils Collaboration with Charles Lloyd and Jason Moran

Alonzo King LINES Ballet announces a new evening-length work created in collaboration with two jazz luminaries: tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd and pianist Jason Moran. Lloyd and Moran perform live every night, accompanying LINES Ballet's company of extraordinary dancers. The work also features a light installation by internationally renowned media art pioneer Jim Campbell.

This world premiere reunites King, Lloyd and Moran, who previously collaborated on LINES Ballet's 2016 work SAND. The San Francisco Chronicle called SAND an "instant classic" and the Mercury News celebrated its "mesmerizing score." They perform their second commissioned score for LINES Ballet, again placing their distinct signatures on the evolution of modern jazz.

An NEA Jazz Master and inductee to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, Lloyd's lifetime achievement has been recognized with some of the highest honors in the field. He shares a boundless, multidisciplinary approach to his craft with Moran, a MacArthur Fellow and Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center. Lloyd and Moran find creative reciprocity with King at LINES Ballet. "Alonzo has a way of hearing," explains Moran. "His choreography becomes melodic content." King's choreography reveals ballet dancers and jazz musicians as not-so-distant kin - in their bodies, sacred texts of the past are discovered anew. In Charles Lloyd's words, jazz "is a music of freedom and wonder." Around it, three masters commune.

Lloyd and Moran will perform live for every performance this season.

Since 1982, Alonzo King LINES Ballet has collaborated with noted composers, musicians and visual artists from around the word to create performances that alter the way we look at ballet today. The Company is guided by a unique artistic vision that adheres to the classical form-the linear, mathematical and geometrical principles that are deeply rooted in the preexisting East-West continuum. LINES Ballet's spring and fall home seasons and global tours share this vision of transformative, revelatory dance with 40,000+ audience members worldwide every year. It has been featured at venues such as the Venice Biennale, Monaco Dance Forum, Maison de la Dance de Lyon, the Edinburgh International Festival, Montpellier Danse, the Wolfsburg Festival, the Holland Dance Festival, and most recently Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris.

Alonzo King has been honored by the dance world's most prestigious institutions for his impact on the cultural fabric of the company's home in San Francisco, as well as nationally and internationally for over more than three decades. Named a Master of Choreography by the Kennedy Center in 2005, King is the recipient of the Doris Duke Foundation Artist Award, the NEA Choreographer's Fellowship, the Jacob's Pillow Creativity Award, the Irvine Fellowship in Dance, the US Artist Award in Dance, and the National Dance Project's Residency and Touring Awards. King has works in the repertories of San Francisco Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet, Béjart Ballet Lausanne, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, Joffrey Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Hong Kong Ballet, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, among others.

"Alonzo King is one of the few ballet choreographers working today who is genuinely thinking and asking his dancers to think, too. Who would have thought that ballet-so historically Western, hierarchical, and white-could be renewed by an African American child of the civil rights movement whose aesthetic vision and inquiring mind are pushing it out of its provincial state into the world" (Jennifer Homans, The New Republic).

Image: Michael Montgomery (photo RJ Muna), Charles Lloyd & Jason Moran (photo JM Walker)