LINES Ballet Spring Season Explores Themes of Dissolution and Transformation
Alonzo King LINES Ballet opened its spring season on May 10 with a powerful double bill. The evening featured the world premiere of The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits, a mesmerizing new work created in collaboration with Oakland-born jazz virtuoso Ambrose Akinmusire. It was paired with a revival of King’s 2009 masterpiece, Scheherazade, a work rooted in rhythmic intensity and mythic themes.
The program opened with The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits, a meditation on vulnerability and form. As the lights dimmed, a soft, ethereal score emerged, drawing us in slowly with quiet insistence.
Dissolving Portraits. Photo by Chris Hardy.
Then Marusya Madubuko appeared. Rising from the floor in measured tension, she alternated between stillness and eruption—arms flung wide, knees buckling, hands trembling. She crawled, rose, and collapsed, her movements suggesting an internal conflict. It was all urgency and unraveling, a powerful introduction to the work’s larger exploration of vulnerability and the human condition.
As the ballet unfolded, dancers Maël Amatoul, Babatunji, Adji Cissoko, Theo Duff-Grant, Shuaib Elhassan, Josh Francique, Mikal Gilbert, Ilaria Guerra, Anna Joy, Marusya Madubuko, Tatum Quiñónez, and Amanda Smith moved in and out of solo vignettes, shimmering under stark lighting. Every evocative movement was a delicate balance of strength and fragility. Each vignette felt suspended in time, as if each dancer were an extension of Akinmusire’s trumpet voice, shedding emotional layers and dissolving before our eyes.
Theo Duff-Grant delivered a quietly devastating standout performance, his solo capturing the tenuous line between collapse and perseverance. Dressed in flowing green silk, he moved across the stage with a kind of wearied urgency: arms heavy, back folding, legs barely holding ground. He was a person at his breaking point. When two other dancers arrived to support him—lifting and steadying him, mirroring his gestures—the moment became a quiet revelation. In a work about dissolution, Duff-Grant’s performance reminded us of what it means to be held through it.
After a brief intermission, the company presented Scheherazade, Alonzo King’s reworking of the iconic figure from One Thousand and One Nights. Traditionally cast as a narrator who survives through storytelling, King has reshaped her into something more abstract and embodied. In his rendition, the narrator is the story, symbolizing feminine wisdom and creative force. Where The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits explores the dissolution of identity, Scheherazade examines transformation through self-realization.
Shuaib Elhassan and Adji Cissoko perform in Scheherazade. Photo by Chris Hardy
The cast—Adji Cissoko, Shuaib Elhassan, Mikal Gilbert, Maël Amatoul, Babatunji, Josh Francique, Theo Duff-Grant, Ilaria Guerra, Anna Joy, Marusya Madubuko, Tatum Quiñónez, and Amanda Smith (with student dancers Maisie Briones and Valentín Juarez)—moved beautifully with charged restraint and precision. Cissoko and Elhassan are at the heart of the piece, grounding it with intense energy and a luminous presence. Cissoko brought Scheherazade’s journey to life, tracing her shift from fear to power with clarity and strength. Opposite her, Elhassan gracefully portrayed Shahryar’s transcendence from a man hell-bent on vengeance to one capable of empathy, shaped by her presence.
These two works don’t just showcase LINES Ballet’s signature athleticism and grace, they remind us of our shared humanity.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet’s spring season continues at Blue Shield of California Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through May 18. If you’ve never seen LINES before, this is the time to go! Tickets are still available.
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