This city used to be where you could fuck around and find out. Not in some precious way, but in the way that actually meant something, where a choreographer could look at a quartet that’s been demolishing the boundaries of what four strings can do for decades and say, “Yeah, let’s see what happens when bodies move to that.” And Kronos have been at this since the ’70s, commissioning pieces from composers nobody’s heard of yet, playing Hendrix arrangements, dragging chamber music kicking and screaming into the present tense.
Alonzo’s the same way with bodies. You watch LINES and it’s not ballet in that Swan Lake sense, it’s ballet like Coltrane was jazz, which is to say it respects the form enough to take it somewhere it’s never been. There’s a rigor there that cuts deeper than technique. It’s spiritual without being wishy-washy about it, which is almost impossible to pull off.
The collaboration thing, that’s where most art dies, honestly. Two egos in a room, everyone protecting their precious vision, some committee-designed compromise nobody believes in. But when it works, and you can tell just watching these guys talk that they’ve figured something out, it’s because both parties are secure enough to blow up what they thought they knew. You bring the chaos of your discipline to meet someone else’s chaos, and if you’re lucky and you’re good and you’re willing to get uncomfortable, something emerges that neither of you could have birthed alone.
San Francisco being strip-mined by money, turned into a theme park version of itself, and the only resistance that matters is the one that keeps making genuinely dangerous, uncompromising art. Not dangerous like shocking-for-its-own-sake, but dangerous like it might actually change how you view the world. Dangerous like it demands something from you. Something more than you just sharing it on your social media feed to your 113 followers.
These two institutions have been at it long enough to know the score. They’ve survived the business cycles and the critics and the indifference and the changing tides, and they’re still here making work that doesn’t pander.