A Journey of Healing
Across North Africa, the all-night music-dance-trance ritual called lila (pronounced lee-lah) is celebrated as a means for spiritual healing.
FREE ARTICLEWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
Let’s make one thing clear upfront: To see a LINES Ballet performance is to partake in wonders beyond measure, to have one’s senses reawakened by the dignity of humanity’s vulnerability, and this is as true now as it has been over many high points of the San Francisco company’s 35 year history. To watch Shuaib Elhassan pause in a pirouette, open-chested and generously alive, in startling harmony with the forces of physics, is life-affirming. To fill your eyes with this miracle while, playing live at the back of the stage, the Kronos Quartet’s richness fills your ears—this is rapture. So it feels ungrateful to report that something seems to go awry halfway through the new Kronos/LINES collaboration, “Common Ground.”
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Shuaib Elhassan and LINES Ballet dancers perform “Common Ground.” Photograph by Chris Hardy
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Across North Africa, the all-night music-dance-trance ritual called lila (pronounced lee-lah) is celebrated as a means for spiritual healing.
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