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Duke Arts Presents

Alonzo King LINES Ballet

Friday, November 15, 2019 | 8:00 pm

Saturday, November 16, 2019 | 8:00 pm

Reynolds Industries Theater


Duke Performances subscriptions and single tickets, including $10 Duke student tickets, are now on sale. Subscriptions and single tickets can be purchased online, via phone at 919-684-4444, and in person at the Duke University Box Office, Tuesday through Friday, 11 AM to 6 PM.

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Born in Georgia to Civil Rights activists, raised in California, and trained at the School of American Ballet, choreographer Alonzo King planted his company, LINES, in what may seem an unlikely place for ballet — San Francisco — in 1982. The city, he has said in conversation with the Kronos Quartet’s David Harrington, had a “unique feeling” to it. 37 years on, feeling — its emotional and kinetic weight — underlies King’s choreographic vision. Onstage, dancers push and comb space; elongations function like cantilevers, balancing meticulous partnered arrangements. Last at Duke Performances in 2010 with Jason Moran and the Bandwagon, LINES returns for a paired program at Reynolds Industries Theater. On the bill: the company’s 2018 world premiere Common Ground, a lively, winding work whose score combines several Kronos-commissioned pieces, as well as repertory classic Handel, a set of movement studies created for the Swedish Royal Ballet in 2005.

Contemporary ballet scholar Dr. Jill Nunes Jensen, who has chronicled the company for years, will give a pre-performance talk prior to the Saturday, November 16 performance. More information about the event here.



Alonzo King & David Harrington in Conversation 'Alonzo King LINES Ballet 'Common Ground' with Kronos Quartet'


“The most sophisticated modernism in classical dance. The number of ballet choreographers who live – and create – solely in the present are so few that one of his distinction must be accounted the artistic equivalent of a shooting star.”

Los Angeles Times