Dancing Your Way Home

As a Nor’easter wreaked havoc along the Mid-Atlantic seaboard, the wet winds calmed down enough by late afternoon to venture out to Alonzo King Lines Ballet that evening. The San Francisco-based company performs twice annually, on the “Left Coast.” Founded in 1982, Lines Ballet only just made its Philadelphia debut at PennLive Arts’ Zellerbach Theatre on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus for three performances. And it was worth the wait.

Performance

Alonzo King Lines Ballet: “Legacy” / “Ode to Alice Coltrane” by Alonzo King

Place

Zellerbach Theatre, PennLive Arts / Annenberg Center, Pennsylvania, PA, September 25, 2026

Words

Merilyn Jackson

Adji Cissoko and Shuaib Elhassan in “Through Two Not Two” by Alonzo King. Photograph by RJ Muna

From the dancer-filled audience, you’d have thought they were the home team. Certainly interconnections between King’s dancers and Philly companies are numerous enough that the crowd was clearly familiar with them. Mikal Gilbert had danced with both Koresh Dance and with Philadanco, where I remembered him in Tommie-Waheed Evans’ Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth. And Adji Cissoko had a choreographic residency with BalletX in 2021. I noted dancers of all three companies, past and present, there to cheer old friends.

The camaraderie in the house warmed me up for a celestial evening of two of King’s most recent choreographies. The opening dance, “Legacy,” premiered last spring at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, with Grammy winner, bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding playing her music composition live onstage. Here, we had a recording which began well enough, but without the movement of Spalding’s colorfully costumed performance downstage right to soften the recording, its 16 sections sometimes grated with redundancies.

Still, the involute wordplay on line and age and astonishing dancing, often with subtle animalistic imagery, led us to the final sections, “Home” and “Your Lineal Seed.” Gorgeous costuming by Robert Rosenwasser had the ripped men frequently bare-chested and in swirling skirts. On Saturday, as the company men lay prone with their backs to us with one arm raised as if to swim to a far shore, Gilbert, the sole perpendicular dancer, posed among them like a flamingo, high on demi-toe, one arm uplifted and one leg bent.

Theo Duff Grant in “Legacy” by Alonzo King. Photograph by RJ Muna

Animal Movement Strength Training, a practice technique, is only a few years old, but by the look of the choreographic phrases that melted into each other like clouds morphing into ever changing animal shapes, King’s 11 dancers seem adept at it. Mikal Gilbert took the place of an injured Theo Duff Grant for remaining shows.

Almost from the beginning, the Ostrich Walk was evident and when one male dancer does it later in fluffy, spangled knee pants, a stiff leg forward, foot flat to the floor, arm craned over his back it’s even more pronounced. Another male masterfully dances Feather Legs, a squatting, tip-toe forward walk that takes great dexterity of the lower body.

A love duet, “Through Two Not Two,” between dancers Cissoko and Shuaib Elhassan, looked like birds mating midair. They brushed each other fleetingly, evoking a breathtaking sensuality.

Adji Cissoko in “Ode to Alice Coltrane” by Alonzo King. Photograph by Chris Hardy

Alice Coltrane, was born in Detroit and briefly married to John Coltrane who would have turned 100 this year. He made Philly his home for many years. The city has been alive with tributes to him. So both cities hold a claim on the Coltrane name. Including King’s 2024 Ode to Alice Coltrane became yet another homage to the two musical icons, and a lovely dance to bring home to Philly. In his inaugural 1982 performance at San Francisco State University, King choreographed his first work to her music. Here, King and music supervisor Philip Perkins use 14 sections of Alice Coltrane’s self-produced recordings. Perkins designed the Prelude music.

Tatum Quiñónez shimmered like a firefly in a gossamer copper-colored, body-skimming shift that evoked Alice Coltrane’s harp strings, one of many instruments she was adept at. The opening chords indued Quiñónez’s movements with a dreamy transcendency. Throughout, she was a radiant wisp, mirroring lighting designer Seah Johnson’s virga-like mists, flowing down the backdrop without reaching the floor. The full company sections looked light-footed as well. I don’t recall much lifting or jetés, but somehow all seemed constantly in flight.

Near the final episode, as the “Going Home” theme that had been hinted at swelled to harmonic layerings, Cissoko, in a glimmering cream shift reenters the stage for a brief solo. She had shaken out her French twist to an afro and virtually soars towards the heavens. Episodic works like these are often choppy looking. But King’s choreography and programming these two together revealed a throughline that was almost like a full-length ballet. Both were about finding your way home, and each episode was a step along the way.

Merilyn Jackson

Merilyn Jackson has written on dance for the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1996 and writes on dance, theater, food, travel and Eastern European culture and Latin American fiction for publications including the New York Times, the Warsaw Voice, the Arizona Republic, Phoenix New Times, MIT’s Technology Review, Arizona Highways, Dance Magazine, Pointe and Dance Teacher, and Broad Street Review. She also writes for tanz magazin and Ballet Review. She was awarded an NEA Critics Fellowship in 2005 to Duke University and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for her novel-in-progress, Solitary Host.

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