A Conversation with Alonzo King & Maurine Knighton

Ahead of Alonzo King LINES Ballet’s week-long residency at The Music Center in Los Angeles, last month Alonzo King sat down for a special virtual conversation with Maurine Knighton, Program Director for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and one of the preeminent supporters of contemporary dance in the United States. Together, they had a vibrant dialogue about Alonzo’s family background, philosophies, and influences.

Watch their discussion in full below, or continue scrolling to read the complete transcript. Our thanks to The Music Center for hosting this thought-provoking event as well as the Company’s live “Dance at Dusk” performances. We hope to return soon!

---

What the critics were saying about LINES Ballet’s performances at The Music Center…

“Indeed, the talent, the expertise and the intent of this stellar dance company is incomparable! The technique of every member of the company, with every movement they make, will fill you with awe. Stunning flexibility, extension, ballon, reach, strength, endurance, passion and fluidity is masterfully executed.” –Broadway World

“The company’s blend of ethnicities, technical prowess, intoxicating musical choices and captivating art direction and costumes combined the ethereal with the powerful, creating a company of astounding artists.” –LA Dance Chronicle

“While all of the performing arts have been adversely affected by Covid, dance was hit particularly hard. Thus was it reassuring—and reaffirming—to be in the presence of flesh-and-blood bodies moving through space as only dancers, specifically those capable of pristine technique while simultaneously mining the human spirit, can make happen.” –Fjord Review

---

Full conversation transcript:

Martin Wechsler:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Music Center’s “Inside Look: a conversation with Alonzo King and Maurine Knighton”. I’m Martin Wechsler, and it’s my honor to be the Senior Advisor for The Music Center Arts Dance Presentations. After an eight-year year absence from our stages, we are thrilled that Alonzo King LINES Ballet will be in residence at The Music Center this week. While they’re here, they have a full schedule of activities to engage with different communities across Los Angeles. These include, of course, the live performances by the company on Jerry Moss Plaza and those include special guest appearances by Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia from New York City Ballet. And for those of you who can’t attend in-person, the Sunday evening performance on July 18th will be live-streamed for free from The Music Center’s website, MusicCenter.org. In addition to the performances, the company will be teaching master classes for professional and pre-professional dancers, and The Music Center is partnering with Lula Washington Dance Theatre, who will be hosting a community event which includes watching the simulcast of the Sunday evening performance. And finally – or I should say to start the week – we are having this “Inside Look” conversation with Alonzo King and Maurine Knighton.

I’ve had the great fortune to know both of these visionaries for many years. Alonzo is the Founder, Artistic Director, and Choreographer for his dance company, Alonzo King LINES Ballet. I first met Maurine when she was the Director of 651 Arts, an amazing dance presenting organization based in Brooklyn, New York. She is now the Program Director for the Arts for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Their full bios are available on our website, MusicCenter.org, and we are thrilled to have them joining us today.

Before we get going, I do want to give special thanks to Glorya Kaufman for her ongoing leadership and generosity. And I also want to thank Center Dance Arts for their support of this talk and for their leadership in supporting dance. I’ll be back at the end of the program to say goodbye, but now it is my great pleasure to welcome Maurine Knighton and Alonzo King. Thank you both so much for being here. I’m now going to leave the two of you for your conversation, but I will look forward to seeing you afterwards. Thank you.

Alonzo King:
Thank you, Martin.

Maurine Knighton:
Thank you, Martin. And thank you to everyone at The Music Center for inviting us, especially inviting me to have this conversation with one of the most important choreographers working today, Alonzo King. Alonzo has been called a visionary choreographer who’s altering the way we look at ballet. He calls his works ‘thought structures’ created by the manipulation of energies that exist in matter, through laws which govern the shapes and movement directions of everything that exists. Named a choreographer with astonishing originality by The New York Times, Alonzo has been guided by his unique artistic vision since 1982 with works in the repertoires of the Royal Swedish Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet, Ballet Bejart, and many others. You can read more about that as Martin mentioned in the biographies available on The Music Center website. Alonzo was honored with a Dance Magazine Award in 2020 and in the year before he received an Honorary Doctorate from the Juilliard School in recognition of his significant contribution to the field of dance. Finally, I’ll say he’s renowned for his skill as a teacher and has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Corps de Ballet International Teacher Conference in 2012. It’s my distinct pleasure to have the opportunity to speak with Alonzo today. Alonzo, how are you? Welcome.

Alonzo King:
Thank you, Maurine. The pleasure is mine. It’s always a joy to have a conversation with you.

Maurine Knighton:
Absolutely. The feeling is mutual, for sure. And then I think one of the special opportunities of this conversation today is to have folks have sort of a little bit of insight into what motivates you, what drives you, and what grounds you as well. So I’d love to start by having us learn a little bit about your background. There are two things that I understand in particular, to have really shaped you as a human being and therefore the work that you bring into the world. One is your family’s history in the civil rights movement, and I’d like to just start by talking about that a moment. The second piece is yoga, which I’d like to hold to the side until we just spend a little time understanding the very profound lineage from which you descend. Your father, of course, Slater King, was at the heart of the development of the Albany Movement, which was the first mass movement in the modern civil rights era to have as its goal the complete desegregation of an entire city. And he was also a close companion, confidant, and colleague of Martin Luther King and a number of others. He also was a businessman with a real estate and insurance brokerage firm that helped African American residents gain economic independence. But as impressive as that is, your family’s history in civil rights doesn’t stop there. Your stepmother, Marion King, was an assistant attorney general for the city of Atlanta during both the Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young administrations. Your grandfather, Clennon Washington Sr., helped establish the Albany chapter of the NAACP. Your Uncle Chevene was a prominent civil rights attorney. So this is something that was a part of your formative years and continues to really be a guiding light for you now. Your family and this work and this dedication to social justice. Can you share more about that with us, please?

Alonzo King:
Yes, I can. Thank you for doing thorough homework (laughs). For so long I used to keep that very quiet. I think that to have been imbibing in that kind of environment where… What people talk so often now about is the lack of community. Well, when I was born and when I was a kid, community was so thick, and so vital, and so real and necessary, that you were getting all of your vitamins from it. I mean, for confidence, for vision, for clarity, for commitment, and how people live their lives. I was surrounded by people who were actually willing to give their lives for what they believed in. So it wasn’t talk. These were people who – their brains and their hearts, their mind in their hearts – they were putting on the table. I remember as a kid going to mass meetings, and they would say, “Now, some of you are going to be hit. Some of you may be brutalized. But you can’t fight back.” And hands all shot up in agreement that they were willing to do that. I think one of the things that affected me years later when I was thinking about it, was the idea of law. Laws. And there are laws that are evil laws. And so why are these laws? There are laws that are untruths. And so why are these enacted and why are they in place? And that same skepticism about what is enacted, what is on paper, what is told to you, I brought to my early education. And so everything that I was exposed to, I was questioning. And the bottom line became, “Is this based in truth?” Whatever any teacher said, whatever I was reading or consuming, I always have to see, “is this reality, or is it yellow gold?”

Maurine Knighton:
That’s really fascinating, because it really provides a great segue to one of the great truths in society, I think, and in various cultures, which is yoga and how yoga grounds us. Now your dad actually introduced you to yoga. And you’ve told me that at this point, it’s the way you see everything.

Alonzo King:
Yes.

Maurine Knighton:
So how did that happen? You know, when we think about centers of yoga in the United States, which wasn’t imported to these shores all that long ago, we don’t necessarily think about southwest Georgia being one of those places. (laughs) So how did your dad discover yoga? And what did it feel like? What was the sense of discovery when he made that introduction of yoga to you?

Alonzo King:
Okay, I just want to finish up that last sentence for a second. It just came to me that the same laws that I was questioning – when I was brought into the laws of Western Classical Dance – that same questioning applied. When I was brought into the do’s, and don’ts, and the why’s, that same scrutiny was applied to those laws as well. My father was a truth seeker and he was a practitioner in Albany, Georgia, of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. So he was a member of the Vedanta Society, and his library was filled with those books. One of my earliest books was one by Gina Cerminara called “Many Lives, Many Mansions”, and it just opened up a whole world to me. I remember at one time I was having difficulty with one of my uncles and my mother – we were driving – and she said, “That acrimony that you’re holding for your uncle will follow you, you know?” She said, “People who we love and people who we hate are drawn back to us”. And she said, “So suppose he was your father in your next life.” That filled me with such horror that I was so nice to that man (laughs) from then on, smiling, gracious, open. Because that possibility scared me to death.

Maurine Knighton:
That’s so interesting, though, because it is such an enlightened idea. But it was shared with you in such a simple manner. It was undeniable, it feels like.

Alonzo King:
(laughs) Yeah. So when we were kids, my father had a meditation room and he would ask me and my siblings, he’d say, “come in”. When he would go to meditate, “I want you to sit down for five minutes”. He said, “Don’t make a noise and then leave as quietly as you can.” And so we would go in and we’d be snickering and giggling, and we’d be trying to squeeze into Lotus posture and looking at him, then looking at each other and mimicking him and giggling. And then we would get up and leave. But it planted a seed. And although I was jesting with my siblings, I was also aware that there was a depth of entry that my father was experiencing and that this was an assistance in dealing with difficulties in life on planet Earth, which he surely was. You know, working in the civil rights movement and all those obstacles and justices. So it planted that seed and I grew it and began to meditate. And later on, my father introduced me to Self Realization Fellowship, which I joined and have been a member ever since.

And I think, to flesh out your question Maurine, is… Yogananda tells us that we human beings all have something in common, and that is: we want to avoid pain and suffering, and we want some kind of joy that never goes stale. A joy that is ever new. And all of our choices are based on that. Chasing something that we think will help us to avoid suffering and chasing something that we think is going to bring us bliss. The way that things are set up, it’s impossible to avoid pain on planet Earth. Suffering can be mitigated by where your mind is placed, and joy is internal. And so what this is telling us, is that happiness is partly dependent on external circumstances, but largely dependent on internal circumstances, of ways that you think, and of tapping into what Teresa of Avila calls the ‘impregnable castle of internal bliss’. Every human being is searching for that. Yoga, not Hatha, but the practice of meditation inherent. And what the rishis thousands of years ago discovered was how we descended through the spine and how we ascend through those chakras back to our origin. In the same way that salmon, when they leave their birth ground, and then they go and they fight, struggling, swimming upstream to get back home – it’s our same journey.

Maurine Knighton:
What a vibrant metaphor. Thank you for sharing that. And it seems like dance-making, or art-making, is part of or is one way that we can be connected to ourselves, to the cosmos, and to deeper meaning. How do you see the connection? And how did you get from the practice of yoga to become a dance maker, or choreographer, or dancer?

Alonzo King:
I think one of the keys for children: they have a very large, powerful, and vibrant inner world. It’s inescapable. Before they become self-conscious, they’re deeply immersed in another world. If you watch babies’ eyes, when you’re looking at them and what they’re looking at and they are steeped in wonder, you know they’re seeing something you can’t! When children come up and tell you that they have a friend? Indeed they do have a friend. But we have lost the connection as adults to our internal playmate. And we have to rekindle that. And so that interior world, which is so present with children, we have to reclaim. It’s one of the tests on planet Earth: how do you become strong without becoming hard? Because hardness cuts things off. And how do you stop chasing the external carrot in the world that will not bring you ultimate fulfillment to go back inside? And so when Dorothy says, “there’s no place like home,” that is telling us that that home is internal. There’s no need to go out. It is inside. And one of the things about – what I remember when I was very first just dancing, before I began training – I was in an internal world. The external world seemed to disappear.

You see it when people are really studious and they may be reading a book, and you say, “Hey!” And they don’t hear you because they’re so deeply concentrated. And so in that same way, concentration, attention, and focus. Where you put it. Wherever you put it, it’s what you will become. So if that concentration, attention and focus is placed in the heart in terms of feeling, in the spiritual eye between the points between the eyebrows, and you relax and let go… With stillness, which is so odd because I’m moving all the time, but it is in stillness where the internal world will begin to unfold. Everyone has had the experience. People who have said, “Why am I thinking I should bring an umbrella? It’s sunny. But why is my thought thinking I should bring an umbrella? It’s sunny.” They go out, an hour later it rains. Those intuitive knowings, that’s just a glimpse of the wisdom that’s inside of us. And so in the ultimate sense, our work is to chisel. To discover that there is an artist inside of us who is working on the masterpiece that all human beings are. That is why we’re here. We’re here to figure out who and what we really are and get back to that, unless we want to waste time (laughs).

Maurine Knighton:
Well, and you talk about the fact that the internal work that art produces forces you to look inside, rather than outside, for fulfillment. And what I hear you saying is that’s something that children do without having to work at it.

Alonzo King:
Absolutely.

Maurine Knighton:
Yeah.

Alonzo King:
Absolutely. It’s… it’s… All of us, we are the seed that has every single thing that’s required. And so when we’re planted in fertile ground – and that means the environment of wherever you are – you bloom. But we also know that seeds planted on sidewalks have a more difficult time, but they too can break through the cracks. And so the potential when we see the Oak tree, you know, when we see the result of plantings in solid ground and healthy ground, the wonder of the human beings that come from that are amazing. But back to your specific point, we have… there’s a point where you stop reading books because you have to become the book. You have to become the living book. And that is internal work. There’s no escape. When you’re in any relationship – friend, beloved, mother, father, sister, brother, you and nature, you and your god, you and your art, you in raising your child – there’s a point in that relationship where you realize: “I’ve got to get out of the way. And my real job is self-reform.” No escape. Because relationships show us our limitations. And that is a beautiful thing to be able to eagerly come to something that may be difficult to observe. And this is why most people stay busy, because when you become still and quiet and then your flaws become apparent, what you’re just saying is, “get this out of the way so there can be more luminance. Get this out of the way so there can be more shining and you’ll be able to share more with people.” It’s an incredible gift (laughs) because you’re looking into the mirror of introspection and it’s telling you the truth.

Maurine Knighton:
And you know, it’s so interesting, Alonzo. Thank you for that. This is really fascinating to me, as I’m sure it is for our viewers who are watching and listening in on this. You talked about the fact that we are missing education that would help us to know some of the things that you’re describing and sharing right now, and that that’s something that we need to pay attention to and that needs to be restored to our schools. Tolerance, patience, and the idea that life doesn’t automatically bring happiness. That it is something that one has to be aware of and consciously manage and bring into manifestation with a more expansive understanding, I think, of what that means. Can you share some more thoughts about how we might make a correction to what is missing in terms of what we and children – talking about children earlier – are receiving in schools?

Alonzo King:
Maurine, that’s so beautiful how you put that. Thank you so much for bringing that up. Once I was invited to speak to a class of medical students at Yale, and I went and we were talking, we were having a discussion about art-making and creativity. And then towards the end of the class, I said, “what was your inspiration for wanting to, you know, for participating in the healing arts?” Each one of them said “wealth and prestige”. I was just blown away. And after the class…

Maurine Knighton:
Really?!

Alonzo King:
Yes, yes.

Maurine Knighton:
Wow, that’s surprising.

Alonzo King:
And after the class, one girl came up to me kind of apologetically and said, “I really want to help people.” (laughs) But she wouldn’t…

Maurine Knighton:
On second thought, yeah.

Alonzo King:
…Yes, she wouldn’t say it amongst her peers. And that was very revelatory. But I will say to you that the… People have to be encouraged to step into silence, to begin the internal search, because it’s the most important one. Look at where we are today with this bursting technological advancement, which is amazing. We will be able, there’s no doubt, that we will be able to replace limbs in the future. We will be able to heal, make all kinds of miraculous and wonderful things to bring to the world. And yet all again, we can’t get along. It was thought of as a facile statement when Rodney King said, “Can’t we all get along?” People laughed at that, at how silly, how simplistic, and yet it is the truth. And why we can’t get along is because we are all at war within ourselves. How many people go to a peace rally and they really hold peace? Who has inner peace? Rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah! So that is the goal. We are not weak, whining mortals. We are immortals. And our job is to discover that and that can’t be discovered by outside seeking. And so external space, as phenomenal and fascinating as it is, is not the final frontier. The final frontier is internal space. And that’s where our search has to begin. How many young children are taught to be silent? Even if we’re just five minutes, to be still and not move. To not expect that they’re going to get what they want instantly. It’s a harm to children. To encourage their development in creativity and play and to talk about kindness and equity and compassion.

Maurine Knighton:
And you’ve talked too about, you know, even when you choreograph new work, that the dancers provide an additional layer of discovery to the dance that you’ve made. For themselves, since they’re doing something more than just the movement, and it’s a revelation to you…

Alonzo King:
Yes.

Maurine Knighton:
…in terms of that deeper level of inquiry and discovery.

Alonzo King:
Yes. Because when you’re building these dance treatises, these are thought structures. And so when you bring ideas into the rehearsal space, these are living ideas that dancers can’t imitate the look. They want to inhabit those ideas so they’re living in their consciousness and pouring out through their bodies in the same way that any musician, through their heart and their mind, they’re pouring that into the instrument, whether it be a piano, whether it be a saxophone, whether it be a violin. And so our bodies are our instruments. And when the dancers are at a super high level, or when any human being gets to a place where they see their body as separate from their self, that is a very liberating place. When you don’t identify this thing as you, but see it as an instrument, a package, something to be used and explored. And that has the psychophysiological centers in it that are profound, that can bring you wonder and elevation, the playing field becomes huge. And so if someone has not done internal work, if they’ve not asked the questions: “Who am I? What do I want to bring to planet Earth? What do I want to have accomplished in terms of giving before I leave the planet? What do I want to bring to this art form that hasn’t been brought before?” And so this is the person who’s giving. This is the person who’s thinking about return. And this is the person who is more interested in the message instead of being the decorated messenger to be looked at. They want the idea to be clear so that it is imbibed by the viewer and somehow their lives are changed. And it can be as simple as seeing someone being free. As seeing someone on stage, completely absorbed in character. Seeing someone who is faultlessly committed to accuracy. Seeing someone who is humble. Seeing someone who is lost in their occupation. These are inspirational because they’re showing us “this, too, is how life can be lived.”

Maurine Knighton:
And so, Alonzo, I have to ask you the question of how you came to dance as the answer to the question that you asked. And the question you asked wasn’t this, but I’m paraphrasing, basically how can you serve? How can you show up in terms of contributing to society? How did you decide that this was your path to doing that? And… I’ll stop there. I see you’re about to answer so I’ll stop there.

Alonzo King:
No, go ahead. Go ahead, Maurine.

Maurine Knighton:
Well, so what I was going to say, and what is it that you are trying to say to folks? What is it that you want to convey through the work that you’re bringing into the world?

Alonzo King:
Yes. I would say that the intensity of commitment has always been something that I’ve witnessed because of the civil rights movement and because of my parents who were art lovers. And my mother was a dancer, and an extraordinary dancer, and I loved watching her move. To me it was mesmerizing and different. There was something about the way that she approached music that was unusual. And I realized that she had her own music that she was playing with while listening to music. And so that dialogue that she would enter was fascinating to me. And then she would teach me steps and we danced together. And that was like, what more could I want, you know? (laughs) You and your mom dancing and that she’s beaming on you and you’re learning stuff? That was heaven. And so that was a portal of entry, and I never left it. You know, there was a point in high school where I had all these scholarships being offered from all these big universities and my father said, “You know, this is your life and it’s your choice.” And my mother said, “Please go to one just for a little bit, please.” (laughs) But I knew that dance was the calling for me. But I also knew that if there was going to be what we call ‘success’ – and that has to be defined personally – that it had to involve others. There had to be a component that had education. There had to be a component that involved the community. And it just couldn’t be me by myself. It had to be like in Indigenous cultures in the dance, when you do the community dance, your single self is disappearing into your larger self. And that was important. And I just want to say as an aside, and that is one of the beautiful things, and the inevitable consequences of a full life, is that the individual dissolves into the universal. And so in that idea of that dissolving into your larger self, that had to be a component in the work.

And I think, to answer your question, that truth and beauty are revelatory. The fact that they exist, that the Sun is shining, giving its warmth, creating photosynthesis, causing things to happen, life to go on… That’s the first exemplar for the artist. That’s what we are. We’re billions of Suns. And so giving is our nature and the point of our lives is we have to radiate. This is what you’re communicating to the dancer. You, the five-pointed star with the head, two arms and two legs, you have to radiate.

Maurine Knighton:
I love it. Thank you. And I want to just pivot a little bit back to something you talked about much earlier in the conversation, and that was your questioning of the law very early on in your life. And then you connected that to really questioning some of the conventions and precepts of Western notions of ballet.

Alonzo King:
Yes.

Maurine Knighton:
Scrutinizing those laws. I think that was the phrase that you used or something like that. So one of the things I think is around the ideas of the origins of ballet.

Alonzo King:
Yes.

Maurine Knighton:
Where it came from, who brought it into being. And of course, there is actually a legacy of ballet back in coming from Persia, India, Africa. Can you share more about that? Because that’s something that I think a lot of people don’t have awareness about.

Alonzo King:
Yes. It’s so big. It’s just so large. There’s the classical ideal and the romantic ideal. Every great civilization has its classical ideal. And so when you hear people say, “Well, I’m not Cinderella,” or “I’m not Sleeping Beauty,” what they’re missing is that the story of Cinderella is in every culture around the globe! Not just Europe. You know, the costuming and the background, that social setup, is presented to us as Cinderella. But the Cinderella story is universal. The Sleeping Beauty story is universal. What are those stories, Maurine? They’re spirituals. There is obstacle. The obstacle is overcome by some kind of awakening from darkness or sleep. That’s when the Prince cuts through the dark forest. Dark forest is ignorance. The awakened by the magic wand of the fairy Godmother. What is the magic wand? The magic wand is your spine, the spine of intuition. And then in all of them: “And they will live happily forever after with their father.” That’s bliss. So these universal stories exist across the board. If you think of Swan Lake, what is Siegfried? Siegfried is not a man, he’s Humanitas. That’s all of us. He has this opportunity to marry the consort who, any, all who are offering themselves to him and step into his father’s footsteps by sitting in the throne after his father leaves the throne. Or he could chase this white bird that he can’t quite grasp. What is the father’s throne? What is the…what is he…why does he query that? And has the white bird as which one should I choose? Because one is conformity – what can be measured, what can be calculated, what can be seen and understood with logic – and the other, the white bird is a symbol for spirit cross-culturally. Does he go after the spirit which he can’t quite grasp and is not…is not solidly real to him? That’s all of us. That’s all of us. That’s what Swan Lake is really about.

Now in terms of the lineage, in terms of the history, what people call ballet and what I call Western classical dance, they’ve been cut off! It’s in the same way that fettered minds, the fettered minds of historians, have tried to cut Egypt away from Africa. It’s that same process of, you know, the West looks back to Greece, but they don’t look to where Greece was looking. Because every single culture, every single civilization looks back on the Golden age of a prior civilization. Rome was looking to Greece. Greece was looking to Persia, Africa, and India. The numeral zero, those numbers they came from India through Persia. The Greek myths, those beautiful treasures, they were hidden in Arabic and Islam brought them back to the Western world. Islam, all that period in, you know, Andalus those 800 years in Europe. Mathematics, surgery, architecture, science. You think dance didn’t have any influence? Where does the term ‘arabesque’ come from? The term ‘the Pavane’. And so that history has been disconnected intentionally, and it will be re-earthed.

There is an ignorance that is taught in mainstream America. And it’s that we have come from an inferior past and now we’re at the pinnacle of civilization. It is a complete falsehood. The high civilizations of China, of Mesoamerica, of India, of Africa, those people were mental and spiritual giants. We still don’t understand the pyramids, and pyramids are all around the globe. And so there is a mental darkness that keeps us from seeing the connection. There’s also this thought that there wasn’t trading and exchanging of ideas going on. What was Columbus doing? He was looking for India, okay. And so that trading of ideas is something that’s always happened. The music that came from the Moorish tradition, that was in the courts of Spain.

And so my final thought – I know I’m talking a lot – is that what happened with, let’s say dance, when it was codified by the French, glorified in Russia, what happened? There was a materialistic drop, because if you were dancing for the king, your focus changed and the king or the tsar could change your life. And so there was a materialization of the presentation, instead of into the spirit to receive your knowledge or information, to entertain royalty. And that began a materialistic drop. And I also, just to finish off Maurine, that the brilliance that is in Western classical dance – and I will say that, why do we use the term ‘ballet’? Because at the beginning of America’s early history, we were incredibly insecure about the classical arts. And so in the very beginning of ballet and America, everyone Russian-ized their name to be legitimate. And it was when Balanchine who came and said, “No, you guys have got it! You have this thing. Let’s combine them together.” So I would say that the winds that carry seeds and ideas and ways of doing things has always been happening in the world. Always, whether people recognize it or not.

Maurine Knighton:
Right. Thank you, Alonzo. And I know you said you’re talking a lot, but that is why we’re here.

Alonzo King:
(laughs)

Maurine Knighton:
That’s perfect. Thank you very much. So I want to just pause for a moment to say, believe it or not, basically we’re almost at time.

Alonzo King:
Ok.

Maurine Knighton:
I want to invite our viewers to submit any questions that they may have in the Q&A box and we’ll get to those that we can. And thank you for submitting them. I’m going to start with one that I’ve already received: do you have any rituals with your dance company before a performance? And, if so, would you be willing to share those with us?

Alonzo King:
Yes. I think that… I love that question because those rituals happen every day for us. And part of them is checking anything that you’re wearing that disguises what you have to say and who you are. Any armor, any veils, any fears, you want to eradicate. And that takes a daily reminder, especially if it goes against your early training. And so the constant question is, “Are you present?” If you’re with someone and you’ve been accustomed to that person, often you can take that person for granted. And so let’s say that that person is ballet. If you’ve done it your whole life, you have to reawaken your relationship with it. And how do we first begin to do that? Gratitude. The fact that you’re doing what you’ve chosen to do. And can you give yourself up to it completely? And so in the art, there is a balancing act between willpower and surrender, and they dance together. If it’s only will, there’s a tenseness, there’s a hard edge, and you are always doing the talking. You remain in the driver’s seat. When there’s surrender, you allow yourself to be danced. You allow another voice to enter. You allow yourself to become a living idea. And so that potentiality is something that you’re addressing every single day. And so the ritual would be a quiet time to introspect, to know your task, and to give yourself completely up to it, and to do a mental scan of what might be interfering and how to jump into willingness and enthusiasm. Even though it might be the fifteenth night of a non-stop series of performances, how do you make it new? How can it be spontaneous?

Maurine Knighton:
Well that sounds like a good ritual for anyone at the beginning of their day, before any major events. So thank you for sharing that. We have a question from C.D.A. Member Susan F: Can you tell us about the piece being performed this coming week? Is there anything that the audience should know before the performance?

Alonzo King:
The first, the opening piece, is a piece called ‘Personal Element’, and it was a commission from Damian Woetzel for the Vail Dance Festival. I admire Damian tremendously and we’re good friends. And in it, he wanted to combine dancers from New York City Ballet with dancers from LINES and so that’s how it began. We began in New York, and we started fusing our work of bringing the dancers in and it was a great blast. And we presented it at Vail. The title is addressing that our scientific approach to law and order has to also have a personal element. And so that in all of our doings and our makings, the heart has to be involved. We think we can extract it, we think we can step away from it, but, no. The heart also has intelligence and wisdom. And so that participation has to be involved from the very beginning. It’s like this idea – that was a big idea for a long time and it’s changing – that you just get technique into the dancer. Just give them the academics. And then after 10 years, we’ll pour art. After 10 years, you’re a wooden, you know, marionette. And so it has to begin from the very beginning. And the heart has to be developed so that it, too, can grow, because as the mind has expansion, so has the heart. And there’s interferences. There’s meannesses in the heart that have to be removed for it to expand. And I would say that that’s also one of the rituals. But… I just lost my train of thought.

Maurine Knighton:
That’s okay. Just talking about the piece for this week and…

Alonzo King:
Oh, yes, yes, yes. And so the ‘Personal Element’, and so that’s what that’s addressing. What you’re seeing this evening is – I mean, whenever we start there, Wednesday – is a series of excerpts from different ballets so that it could all fit in one hour with the COVID restriction. And so we’ve excerpted different ballets. We’re having incredible guests, that’s Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia from New York City Ballet. We had created a duet and a solo for a performance at Kennedy Center during the pandemic and we’re going to bring that to L.A. and all of us are really excited about it. And I love working with Tiler and Roman. And Roman I worked with in ‘Personal Element’.

Maurine Knighton:
Yeah. And I will just say for our viewers that I had the privilege of seeing the work in progress, getting a sneak peek when Alonzo and LINES were at Juilliard a while back. You should not miss it, for sure. It’s a beautiful, powerful piece of work. We have a question from Kirsten N. Oh! This is a simple question, Alonzo: What’s your creative process? … I’m saying that sarcastically, of course, I know that it is a very deep creative process.

Alonzo King:
I think, you know, of all the things that I could talk about in the creative process, what I would really say at its core is: what can I contribute to this world that will have value? That will have truth and beauty? That will feed people and inspire thought? And that can stay here long after I’m gone? I think that is the point.

Maurine Knighton:
Thank you, Alonzo. The last question, which comes from Richard H.: Do you place yourself in a category such as ‘modern,’ ‘ballet,’ or so on?

Alonzo King:
I think all categorizations are limiting… Because that’s one of our big problems is, we identify with ourselves as our body, and we’re not! My thoughts, look, physical form, that’s not who I am. When you begin to peel the onions away – race, age, gender, geographic location, religion, family member – those things are roles. R-O-L-E-S. What we are is the soul. And we’ve lost connection with that identity of the soul. And it’s one of the most important things to realign. It’s to connect back to the soul. Because the body and all of those identifications (claps) they’re going to be… They have an expiration date. But your soul does not. And if we think about all the great lessons of life that… You can’t take anything that you’ve acquired on planet Earth with you, unless it is love, compassion, how you’ve transformed your life, what you’ve given to other people. This can be taken with the soul. And so in that dancing – because dancing, music, art – this is soul language. It is language from soul-to-soul. So in a large sense, that is the point – to speak to the soul. Of course, there’s intellect, there’s logic, there’s reason, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the main point is to play Cupid and shoot the arrow of the soul so that we’re put into aesthetic shock and slapped back into memory of our potentiality and what we really are.

Maurine Knighton:
Wow. That is a wonderful note on which to conclude our conversation. You know, Alonzo, I could talk to you for hours, and it has happened before.

Alonzo King:
(laughs)

Maurine Knighton:
So this is wonderful and I just want to thank you for sharing so much with us today. And with that, I will turn it back to our host, Martin.

Martin Wechsler:
Thank you both so much. Maurine, thank you. And Alonzo, hearing you speaking is always just so inspiring. And I can’t wait to see the performance this coming – starting on Wednesday night. Before we say goodnight, I’d like to let the viewers know that if they’re interested in seeing the performance live at The Music Center on Jerry Moss Plaza that they should check our website, MusicCenter.org, or you can call the box office to see if there are any remaining tickets available for purchase. But as a reminder, if you can’t get a ticket to a live show, that we will be live-streaming the performance so anyone with an internet connection can see it on Sunday, July 18th, at 7:30pm. That’s Pacific Time, so a little late for those people who will be in New York and elsewhere on the East Coast. And this live stream is free. You just need to register as I said at MusicCenter.org. Another reminder that the Lula Washington Dance Theatre will be holding a community event on their space on that Sunday where people can gather together to watch the simulcast of the LINES performance. For more information about this event, please send an email to the Lula Washington Dance Theatre. And the address is School.LWDT – that stands for Lula Washington Dance Theatre – @gmail.com. Again, that’s School.LWDT@gmail com. And finally, I want to just say once again, thank you, Maurine. Thank you, Alonzo. And thank you to our viewers for watching tonight. We at The Music Center look forward to sharing more opportunities for dance learning, for dance watching, and for you to be dancing at The Music Center in the very near future. And thank you. And bye for now.