Pole Star isn’t ballet as usual or some cross cultural mash note. This is something else, bodies moving through my Reunion Island footage like they are mapping coordinates between volcanic eruptions and the đàn bầu’s single string howl, between lava fields cooling into black glass and Vietnamese tradition stretched taut across a stage at YBCA in San Francisco.
Võ’s music doesn’t accompany the dancers; it inhabits the same nervous system, breathing with them. The đàn tranh’s cascading notes and the percussive snap of bamboo against skin created this restless topography that the dancers navigated like they were reading weather patterns in real time. Alonzo’s choreography has always rejected ballet’s aristocratic bullshit in favor of something more,the body as antenna, picking up frequencies from the floor, from light, from sound. Here, with my projections of Reunion’s raw geology bleeding across the dancers’ silhouettes, it becomes about triangulation: Asian diaspora, African island, American stage, all pulling at each other like magnetic poles.
My images, those cratered landscapes, mist shrouded peaks, the violent beauty of rock meeting ocean, they weren’t backdrop decoration. They are the fourth performer, reminding everyone that the earth itself is always dancing, always in conversation with time and force and entropy. When those bodies suspended in space, backlit by my volcanic textures, it feels like watching evolution happen in real time.
This wasn’t fusion. It was collision, friction, the good kind that generates heat and new forms.
The world premier of Alonzo King LINES Ballet Pole Star, with Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.