Dancers From Alonzo King Lines Ballet In Oakland

PERFORMANCE Courtney Henry & Jeffrey Van Sciver will be performing a pas de duex from Alonzo King's work "Biophony" which premiered at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in April 2015. This work was a collaboration with natural soundscape artist Bernie Krause and composer Richard Blackford, who worked with King to compose a ballet score from several rare habitats around the globe, both marine and terrestrial. The duet being performed this evening is titled "Mare Nostrum" and is the third movement of eight. Beginning with a surface geophony of ocean waves, the aquatic sonic journey slowly draws use below the surface where we hear the combined vocalizations of humpback whales interleaved with numerous species of fish. Costume Design by Robert Rosenwasser. FILM The performance is presented in concert with The Sea is History (work in progress), made in the Dominican Republic and Haiti – a free adaptation of the poem by Derek Walcott. The film is a materialist and animist critique of the monumentalisation of European colonial history, reading the past instead as something intimately entangled within the present - as a living and mutational thing made up of the living and the dead. It is in this sense that the film suggests a way beyond the boundary évent that could be called the Plantationocene (brought on with the onset of modernity and the system of globalised capitalism that started with the colonisation of the Americas in 1492, with Columbus arriving in Ayiti; latter day Dominican Republic) - and towards a possible "Chthulucenic" future of créolised assemblages as a politics of re-narrativising death within life. Made in Santo Domingo - the first capital of the New World, and on Lago Enriquillo - a hyper-salinated lake, once part of the Caribbean sea, that is flooding the border with Haiti due to the drastic rise in sea temperatures that are currently deeply affecting the global ocean. __________ LINES Ballet has been featured at venues such as the Venice Biennale, Monaco Dance Forum, Maison de la Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival, Montpellier Danse, the Wolfsburg Festival, the Holland Dance Festival, and most recently Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris. __________ At the MATATU Festival of Stories, we are curating film, literature, and performance art that engages and, when necessary, problematizes “the group.” As a fiscally sponsored project of Intersection for the Arts, MATATU is a production house featuring arthouse film and performance. Most of the stories are rare to find and sourced from the continent of Africa and the Caribbean. More Info below.