Refraction

Pour cette pièce créée au Festival Montpellier Danse 2010, Alonzo King exalte l’individualisme des danseurs grâce aux extraordinaires sonorités du compositeur Jason Moran. Captation retransmise en direct sur Arte.

Alonzo King is committed to upholding a vision of humanity, based on sharing and freedom, without renouncing his origins, which are deeply rooted in the American imagination. For Refraction, he exalts the individualism of dancers, thanks to the extraordinary sonorities of composer Jason Moran Dustand Light plunges the spectator into the intimate, radiant atmosphere of Corelli’s baroque variations, combined with the choral songs of Francis Poulenc.

When Jason Moran played the Village Vanguard in New York a few years ago, he opened the set with a little layering of recorded sounds in which he heard a harmonious synthesis: there was a slice of Bartok, which slid into a rap phrase laid over a Delta-blues guitar lick, and then, rolling out over the top, the sonorous tones of Sir John Gielgud, the eminent Shakespearean actor, declaiming those lines from The Merchant of Venice: “Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music/Creep in our ears.” Named “the most provocative thinker in current jazz” by Rolling Stone, and recently honored as one of the “37 Under 36: America’s Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences” by the Smithsonian, Jason Moran is both steeped in the traditions of jazz and committed to pushing its boundaries. He combines technical virtuosity with an open-ended approach to jazz ; the New York Times called the Vanguard performances “pliable, hot, telepathic.”
Moran is also a fearless explorer of the musicality of our everyday lives. “I am always hoping my music will move its audience,” Jason Moran said about his collaboration with Alonzo King Lines Ballet. “And, as a young musician, I often wonder what effect my music would have on conscious movement.”
Moran’s collaboration with Lines Ballet, Refraction, which premiered in Fall 2009 in San Francisco, marked the first time Moran had composed for dance. He confided that his first experience watching Alonzo King and the Lines dancers in the studio was “a breakthrough – I wasn’t ready for what I witnessed,” and is intent on listening for the underlying music of their movement, the song that hums in the body : the wondrous creeping of music in our ears.

Source : Alonzo King Lines Ballet