www.linesballet.org

Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, an international touring company based in San Francisco, performs unique contemporary ballets created by Alonzo King.  Established 26 years ago, LINES Ballet continues to receive acclaim for Alonzo King’s visionary choreography, and for the extraordinary quality of its dancers.  When not on tour—performing in venues from the Venice Biennale to the Holland Dance Festival to Montpellier Danse in France—the Company also appears onstage during spring and fall home seasons in San Francisco. 

Collaborating with noted composers, musicians, and visual artists, Alonzo King creates works that draw on a diverse set of deeply rooted cultural traditions and imbue classical ballet with new expressive potential.  Alonzo King’s choreography is renowned for its ability to connect audiences to a profound sense of shared humanity—of vulnerability and tenderness, but also of furious abandon and exhilarating freedom.

LINES has collaborated with legendary jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders; India's national treasure, tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain; Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock; actor Danny Glover; Japanese classical composer Somei Satoh; celebrated Polish composer Pavel Syzmanski; and Nubian oud master Hamza El Din. One of the Company’s great successes was bringing sixteen musicians and dancers from the Lobaye Forest of Central African Republic—the BaAka—for the People of the Forest project. Last spring, LINES Ballet premiered its collaborative project with the Shaolin monks, an unprecedented synthesis of Eastern and Western classical forms that intertwined martial arts and ballet.

Six years ago, the LINES Ballet School and Pre-Professional Program were established, in order to develop the potential of young dancers.  LINES Ballet continues its commitment to dance education and community involvement through the San Francisco Dance Center, now one of the largest dance facilities on the West Coast. In Fall 2006, LINES Ballet embarked on a partnership with the Dominican University of California, inaugurating the Joint BFA Program in Dance; this is the only Joint BFA program in the country to be led by an active, world-renowned choreographer. This year also marks the Company’s fifth Princess Grace Award, given to LINES dancer Meredith Webster in Fall 2007.