Wanderlust on Mafate Reunion Island with Alonzo King LINES Ballet Company. A Site Specific Dance in Mafate National Park on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean.
The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.
Look Homeward, Angel
Standing on top of a volcanic ridge in the middle of the Indian Ocean, watching two impossibly flexible humans contort themselves against a backdrop that would make Defoe weep with envy, this wasn’t on my bingo card. But here we are. Mafate. Réunion Island. The kind of place where you half expect to find the remnants of some doomed expedition, all gone Lord of the Flies by week three.
Babatunji and Madeline DeVries, these LINES Ballet dancers? They’re not just talented. They’re weaponized elegance. And I’m here with a camera, sweating through my shirt at altitude, trying to capture what is essentially the impossible: the human body defying physics in a place where most humans have no business being.
The thing about mountains on tropical islands is they mess with your head. Wells would have understood this, that sensation of being utterly removed from the known world, of existing in some pocket universe where different rules apply. Down below, there’s civilization, wifi, overpriced cocktails with little umbrellas. Up here? Nothing but wind, rock, and these two dancers moving like they’re channeling something primal. Something that predates prosceniums and theaters and polite applause.
This is what contemporary dance needs. Not another technically perfect performance in a climate-controlled theater. This. Artists doing what artists are actually supposed to do: pushing past the comfortable, shattering the boundaries of what we think is possible. You want to take it to the next level? You drag your art to the literal edge of the world and see if it still speaks. You risk everything: your body, your safety, your sanity. Because that’s where truth lives. On the precipice.
I watch Madeline extend into an arabesque on a ledge that drops away into literally nothing. My palms sweat. The photographer in me is thinking about the light, about the composition, about this once-in-a-lifetime moment. The human part of me is wondering what particular brand of beautiful insanity brings people to mountaintops to dance.
Babatunji moves like water. Like he’s been marooned here, all Crusoe-style, and adapted, evolved, become something that belongs to this ridge more than to any stage. That’s what great performers do, isn’t it? They colonize space. They make it submit. And in doing so, they break through every safe assumption about where dance belongs, what dance should be.
This is boundary-breaking in its purest form. Not conceptual. Not theoretical. Physical. Real. The kind of artistic risk that makes your pulse quicken because you know, you absolutely know, that if they fall, if they fail, there’s no safety net. There’s just rock and void and consequence. That’s integrity. That’s what happens when artists refuse to be domesticated.
And I’m the witness. Standing here with my gear, completely aware of the absurdity, the beautiful, necessary absurdity of documenting grace in a place this unforgiving. The island doesn’t care about art. The wind doesn’t pause for perfect composition. But these dancers? They came here anyway. They brought civilization’s highest achievement, disciplined human movement, to the edge of the civilized world, then pushed it further still.