Big name/legendary collaborations are usually a letdown. Two “titans” get in a room together and suddenly everyone’s so fucking precious about their legacy that nothing actually happens, just a lot of careful posturing and committe meeting compromise dressed up in press release language about “exciting new directions” and “boundary-pushing work.”
But thirty-five years? Thirty-five years of near-misses in and around San Francisco before Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet and Kronos Quartet finally locked in? That’s not preciousness. That’s the universe saying wait for it. Because when these two institutions finally shared a stage at YBCA, what emerged wasn’t some diplomatic détente between dance and strings, it was a full-throated conversation about what bodies and instruments can actually say to each other when nobody’s trying to be polite.
The piece opens with water. Not as metaphor-lite or some undergraduate film school symbolism, but water as the thing we can’t escape, the thing that surrounds this impossible peninsula city, the thing that erodes and persists and doesn’t give a damn about your artistic vision. My projections of Sutro Baths, that ruined monument to Victorian excess getting pummeled by the Pacific, set the temperature before a single note or movement. Then the scrim lifts and there’s Kronos in half-shadow, David Harrington and crew turning their strings into percussion, into water droplets, into something beyond the concert hall’s usual reverence. And the dancers respond in Robert Rosenwasser’s wave-curl costumes, all whites and blues and mermaid scallops, moving like they’re underwater but weightless.
This wasn’t fusion. This was collision. Forty minutes of bodies carving space while Kronos stomped and plucked through their Fifty for the Future project, music designed to be shared, not hoarded behind intellectual property walls. Everything about this screamed against the commodification impulse, the let’s-monetize-every-note capitalism that’s strangling art. Instead: Commons. Collective resources. The radical notion that not everything needs to be locked down.