You want to talk about cultural collision? Most of what passes for East-meets-West is appropriation with a program note. People love to talk about ‘bridging cultures’ while they’re busy strip-mining one for the other’s benefit. It’s exhausting. So when you actually witness two masters from different worlds meeting as equals, creating something neither could make alone, you pay attention. I’m talking about Alonzo King and Zakir Hussain in a room together, making something that shouldn’t work but does. April 2018, tech rehearsal at Yerba Buena. LINES Ballet’s 35th anniversary. The air is electric with the kind of nervous energy that precedes either disaster or transcendence.
Sutra. The word means “thread”, what holds things together. What stitches the universe into something coherent instead of chaos. King and Hussain, they’ve been doing this dance for two decades. Not literally dancing, though Hussain’s tabla playing is its own kind of movement, his hands a blur over the drums, creating rhythms that shouldn’t be possible, patterns that rewire your nervous system in real time. And this, watching dancers respond to live Indian classical music, watching them become physical manifestations of rhythm itself, this isn’t some performative gesture of cultural appreciation. This is what happens when East and West stop posturing and actually listen to each other. When two masters speak the same language even though they’re using different alphabets.
Madeline DeVries in that opening. Flesh-colored beaded tunic, body moving through positions that look like ancient temple carvings come to life. Shiva-like extensions, yogic impossibilities made casual. Her feet—arrow-sharp and articulate as language. You watch her and you understand why people used to think dancers were possessed by gods.
Then the others join. Babatunji with his explosive intensity, Maya Harr with that steely gaze that could cut glass, Shuaib Elhassan at six-foot-four, making the stage feel both enormous and intimate. James Gowan rising from the floor like mercury finding its level. These aren’t just athletes or technicians. They’re translators, turning Zakir’s complex rhythmic mathematics and Sabir Khan’s sarangi wails into something the body can read.
The fabric section, that’s when it gets dangerous. Dancers buried under mountains of silk, earth tones and bright yellows and soft pinks, tossing scarves into the air until the stage looks like it’s on fire with color. Then slowly, someone, Jeffrey van Sciver, under all that textile chaos starts to move, and the whole pile becomes animate. Alive. It’s unsettling in the best way, like watching something be born that you can’t quite name.
Seventy plus minutes without intermission. No mercy, no breaks. The dancers are exhausted, the musicians are exhausted, I’m exhausted just trying to capture it. But that’s the point. Transcendence isn’t convenient. It doesn’t check your schedule or ask permission. It demands everything you’ve got and then asks for more.
Robert Rosenwasser’s costumes, minimal, tactile, designed to move. Nothing extraneous. Scott Bolman and David Finn’s lighting carving moments out of darkness, making bodies into sculpture, then releasing them back into motion. Everyone in service of the same impossible goal: make the invisible visible. Make the spiritual physical. Make the ancient speak to now.
King talks about his dancers being larger than their definitions. Watching them move to nine different ragas, each one a distinct emotional landscape, you believe him. This isn’t ballet with an Indian soundtrack. This isn’t Indian classical dance in pointe shoes. It’s something else entirely. Something that happens in the spaces between traditions, where the rules break down and new vocabularies emerge.
By the end, the dancers are on the ground, breathing hard, hair loosened, real sweat, real fatigue. The men in a circle, the women catching their breath. This is what it costs to hold the thread, to be the sutra that binds disparate worlds together. And my job? Same as always. Bear witness. Prove it happened. Try to steal a fraction of that energy and trap it in a frame, knowing it’s impossible, doing it anyway.
Because some things shouldn’t work. East and West, tradition and innovation, control and abandon. But in that theater, for those seventy+ minutes, it did. It worked perfectly. And I’ve got the photographs to prove it, even if they can’t possibly capture what it felt like to be there when grace danced and we all danced with it.
Every time I play with someone, just interacting with them points me to a different nook or a corner in my playing that I had overlooked.
in Zakir Hussain and Master Musicians of IndiaÂ