Credit: Marty Sohl

Parallel Lines

Irregular Pearl melds baroque music and contemporary ballet

When Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet bounds onto the stage at the Royal this week, there’s no doubt the dancers and choreography of the famed San Francisco ballet company will wow the audience. But one might want to pay a little extra attention to what’s coming out of the orchestra pit.

The company’s Irregular Pearl program, which explores the similarities between the more open approach of Baroque music and King’s dynamic choreography, features Indian tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and original baroque-era compositions stitched together by composer Roy Wheldon. For the Bay-area composer, who has been called a “key figure in the world of new music” by Early Music America, the project was his first experience composing for ballet.

“It’s inspired me,” says Wheldon. “I think it would be very interesting if I could get to compose a ballet in which all the music was mine, not simply the transitions.”

While the project was inspiring, it involved a lot of give and take for Wheldon. The composer had about two weeks to write the transitions and a prelude for the 30-minute portion of the ballet after sitting in on a rehearsal and getting comments from King as well as working from a DVD recording of the performance—something which turned out to be a bit of a detriment.

“It was dangerous in a way,” he says of working from a recording. “Alonzo’s balletic style, at least in this piece, is not something which could be captured on video. It led me down the wrong path, in one way, in that I scored it as if it were truly a movie; I scored things to the nanosecond, really timing things out so that certain balletic moves were accompanied by a specific musical gesture. He didn’t want that; he wanted freedom for his dancers. So when we actually got the music and played it for the first rehearsal, we ended up taking our erasers out and expunging a lot of stuff I had written in order to give the dancers the utmost freedom.”

But Wheldon says it was par for the course when it comes to baroque music. “What we ended up doing was improvising on what I had written,” he recalls. “It wasn’t such a stretch for the musicians in the pit because they’re all trained in the Baroque style and that involves a certain amount of ornamentation and improvisation. I didn’t have to rewrite everything because I just relied on their intuitive sense.”

Indeed, he was relying on their intuitive sense up until the dress rehearsal, when King told Wheldon one of the transitions wasn’t working and asked the orchestra to improvise a new one. After spending a couple hours that night writing out the new piece and then practicing it in the dressing room before the next rehearsal, Wheldon was faced with another challenge.

“It reminded me of several people at the scene of an accident and they each have their own story about what happened. Everybody said to me, ‘This isn’t what we improvised.’ Everybody had a different idea of what had happened during that improvisation, so after several terrifying minutes of confusion, my version won out because I had been the only one to write it down,” says Wheldon. “When we got into the pit and actually played it for Alonzo, he said, ‘That’s what I want, it’s perfect.’”

Wheldon will also be playing the viola da gamba in the orchestra—for those uninitiated in the taxonomy of certain stringed instruments (guilty as charged), that translates into “string instrument of the leg.”

“The real name for the viola—at least in the 17th and 18th centuries—was viola da braccio, meaning a string instrument of the arm,” explains Wheldon. “The name viola da gamba refers to the fact that all members of the viola da gamba family—which are soprano to bass, just like in the viola da braccio family—are played between the knees and the violin family, the viola da bracha family, are for the most part played under the chin or on the arm.”

So, will listeners be able to discern Wheldon’s compositions from the original Baroque pieces? Perhaps.

“Some of them will sound contemporary, especially those transitions which are nearer the beginning of the ballet,” he says. “On the other hand, some of the transitions I wanted to be almost indistinguishable from the Baroque style, but I made sure that in a close and careful listening of the transitions, there would always be something which would be un-Baroque about it.”

A good reason to keep your eyes on the stage and your ears on the pit for this performance.

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Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet
8pm Wednesday-Thursday, Oct. 1-2
Royal Theatre, 805 Broughton
Tickets $36-$79
250-386-6121 • dancevictoria.com