The deep art…
That’s the part that has to be guarded like a miser would his money…
Like a dope addict would his dope…
Like a lover with their love.
Alonzo King
What I’ve got here is the real raw nerve ending of creation caught mid spasm: dancers drilling themselves into some kind of transcendent oblivion in a fluorescent lit studio on Market Street that smells like sweat and rosin and the particular desperation of people trying to turn their bodies into pure idea. Alonzo’s got this line about guarding “the deep art”, which is either the most pretentious thing you’ve ever heard or the only honest metaphor for what it actually takes to make something that matters, and frankly both things can be true simultaneously. This isn’t the glittery Broadway finale or the Instagram ready grand jeté: this is the grinding, unglamorous rehearsal footage, the part where you see people actually working, where the illusion gets built brick by sweaty brick, where bodies become arguments and movement becomes language, and if you can’t handle watching the sausage get made then you were never really interested in art in the first place, you just wanted the pretty lie. Which is totally ok, I’ve seen The Real Housewives of Where Ever The Fuck and understand.
But here. This… The whole thing feels like watching someone purposefully choose the hard path, the one that demands everything and promises nothing except maybe, if you’re lucky, a few minutes where physics and poetry converge and something genuinely true happens.
Video: Behind the scenes in the studio rehearsal footage of LINES Ballet’s upcoming collaboration with Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ for their world premier of Pole Star.