Review: Alonzo King LINES Ballet performing The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits & Scheherazade, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, May 10-19, 2025
- Jen Norris
- May 12
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
The Sunday, May 5th 5 p.m. performance by Alonzo King LINES Ballet at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco blew my socks off. A pair of one-act ballets comprise the program: the world premiere of The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits and a long-anticipated remount of Scheherazade (2009). King, who is the sole dance maker for LINES these 43 years, continues to expand the possibilities of contemporary ballet with each new work. King’s partner, Robert Rosenwasser, shapes the conceptual design and production of each project at the company. The rectangular black stagefloor for Beauty is edged with electric-blue light tubes, whose emanating glow, combined with Alexander V. Nichols’s side lights, casts the dancers as sparkling gems upon a black velvet jeweler’s pad.
King and Rosenwasser are often joined by a musical collaborator, whose perspective helps shape the piece. Trumpet phenom Ambrose Akinmusire composed the score for Beauty, and performs live for this run of performances. Perched downstage and facing the dancers, the interplay between musician and dancer is electric. With his trumpet vibrating like the whoosh of hummingbird wings, Akinmusire provides an audio partner for Ilaria Guerra’s twisting, pivoting form. Crouched childlike, Marusya Madubuko hops sideways, before rising combatively, fist flying at imagined adversaries. With only herself to trust, she asserts a sustained one-legged balance. Akinmusire matches her new found steadiness by holding a note of his own.
Dissolving portraits is an apt metaphor for the bespoke dances King offers each dancer, and us, the viewers. An abstract ballet for the whole ensemble, Beauty overflows with impactful solos and small ensembles, which amplify and take advantage of a specific dancer’s sensibilities and exceptional abilities. Whether walking on palms and toes in an elevated downward dog, or reversing direction midair, soaring and spinning, Maël Amatoul personifies youthful grace. Arching deeply backward, Theo Duff-Grant displays his supple torso in a dreamy solo which builds toward confidence and joy.
Beauty concludes in typical King fashion with a no-holds-barred finale, a mixture of fierce and furious unison work for the whole company. The final moments find Madubuko highlighted, in the throes of a spastic breakdown, her limbs quaking with the trumpeter’s every intonation. Awash in midnight blue, the prone restless bodies of the other dancers cover the floor. This ultimate portrait builds to a kind of overexposure before evaporating in a flash to darkness.
The revival of King’s Scheherazade celebrates the legacy of classical tabla virtuoso and composer Zakir Hussain, whose groundbreaking score combines the lush orchestrations of Rimsky-Korsakov with traditional Eastern and Western instruments. In Scheherazade, King potently reimagines the classic Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic tales from One Thousand and One Nights. To summarize for newcomers, a Sultan, driven by grief and revenge, vows to marry a new woman each night and execute her the following morning. Scheherazade agrees to marry him. At night she tells him a story which is both enthralling and incomplete. He spares her life so he might hear the end. This pattern repeats for many nights, until after a thousand nights she runs out of stories and so perhaps her time has come. However, a love has grown where once suffering, fear, and violence resided. While the story is simple enough, its deeper meaning for King is that “women are the saviors of mankind.”
Watching Scheherazade feels like attending a masterful pyrotechnic display, which begins with a flourish of fireworks and builds with crackling excitement, as fresh tricks are introduced, before erupting in an awe-inspiring spectacular finish. King’s ballet works on both narrative and emotional levels and my companion, who knew little of the story, was none-the-less as mesmerized throughout as the Sultan during story hour.
Axel Morgenthaler’s lighting, and Rosenwasser’s sets and costumes, create an ever-evolving dramatic environment. Palatial-scale walls part to form a vaulting entrance arch, behind which a rippling drop winks. Sliding out of sight, the walls reveal a dynamic stage-backing, which resembles a huge expanse of crinkled brown paper. Its surface is highly receptive to light, and vibrant contrasting colors twinkle through crevices in the surface. Depending on the hues in play, abstract landscapes of briny ocean depths, or vast parched desert emerge. Above the stage, an inverted origami mountain range, in the form of stiffly ruched golden-brown fabric, lives and breathes with the dancers, hovering and flowing in its own dance, thanks to careful manipulation of its offstage guidewires.
With his back to us, arms open to the heavens, Shuaib Elhassan’s opening pose could be one of receptive prayer or an assertion of power. As, Shahryar, the Sultan, Elhassan’s character evolves from the cruel impersonal man unmoved by a wife’s pleas and frenzied fists, to a man whose face radiates compassion, as his cheek brushes the face of his beloved by story’s conclusion.
But we get ahead of ourselves; first to battle. Fighting for her life, Amanda Smith is a snarling powerhouse. Leaping defiantly out of Elhassan’s arms, she strikes out with defiance before succumbing, her limp body discarded casually into a waiting slave’s arms.
Adji Cissoko is transfixing as Scheherazade, who must allow herself to be vulnerable to the control of the Sultan, before she can gain his trust and slowly build his capacity for love. It is an emotional balancing act as thrilling as she, en pointe in full split leg extension. We worry for her as Elhassan, gripping her hands in his, twists her arms, forcing her body to follow. Cissoko and Elhassan’s partnership is magnetic. Having danced together for LINES for almost a dozen years now, their ability to complete each other is incomparable. In one memorable section, Cissoko’s ankle is shackled, a heavy chain connecting her to Elhassan, and yet her elegance and humanity prevail.
The world of this ancient kingdom includes a bevy of exotic women, think peacock feathered tutu, and agile men who catch the vaulting form of Amatoul and make an offering of him to the gods. One of the treasures of this realm is Madubuko, who stands assuredly upon her toe before ever so slowly swinging her leg upward in a display of unearthly balance and control. Watching over the proceedings is the Vizier, or commanding officer, Mikal Gilbert, whose virtuosic dance of windmilling arms and pivoting split jumps to tribal drum beats amplifies the breaking tension as the Sutan’s changing heart welcomes a new freedom for all.
The civil rights battle cry "None of us are free until all of us are free," comes to mind as the ensemble takes to the stage in joyous abandon. Loose limbed strutting, two footed chugging driven by rhythmic arm pulses and unique offerings of praise in physical form erupt, both onstage and in the audience as the curtain falls on a remarkable dance. This program runs next weekend as well, May 15-18 leaving time for you to behold the majesty for yourself.
Review by Jen Norris, published May 12, 2025
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Production Credits:
Alonzo King LINES Ballet
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS BLUE SHIELD OF CALIFORNIA THEATER Saturday, May 10 | 7:30 PM Sunday, May 11 | 5 PM Thursday, May 15 | 7:30 PM Friday, May 16 | 7:30 PM Saturday, May 17 | 5:25 PM | Gala Sunday, May 18 | 5 PM
The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits
World Premiere: YBCA, San Francisco, 2025
Choreography Alonzo King
Music Ambrose Akinmusire*
Lighting Design Alexander V. Nichols
Costume Design Robert Rosenwasser
Sound Design Philip Perkins
Company
Maël Amatoul, Babatunji, Adji Cissoko, Theo Duff-Grant, Shuaib Elhassan, Josh Francique, Mikal Gilbert, Ilaria Guerra, Anna Joy, Marusya Madubuko, Tatum Quiñónez, Amanda Smith
Scheherazade
Alonzo King LINES Ballet commissioned by the Monaco Dance Forum, Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, 2009
Choreography Alonzo King
Music Zakir Hussain after Rimsky-Korsakov*
Original Lighting Design Axel Morgenthaler
Lighting Restaging Seah Johnson
Special thanks to G Chris Griffn
Costume and Set Design Robert Rosenwasser
Costume Bodice Design Colleen Quen
Staging Meredith Webster
Sound Design Philip Perkins
Cast
Scheherazade: Adji Cissoko
Shahryar: Shuaib Elhassan
Vizier: Mikal Gilbert
Company: Maël Amatoul, Babatunji, Josh Francique, Theo Duff-Grant, Ilaria Guerra, Anna Joy, Marusya Madubuko, Tatum Quiñónez, Amanda Smith
Performing LINES Students: Maisie Briones and Valentín Juárez
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