During the endless screen time of 2020’s lockdown, a series of dance films cut through the digital noise. There Is No Standing Still, the films by US choreographer Alonzo King, found dancers embedded in their environments, dancing in woods and gardens, on mountains and beaches, against urban concrete in the San Francisco sun. Their movements were arresting, with exquisite technical abilities and copious soul.
For King, it was a return to the source. “Nature is everything,” he says. “That’s the first pirouette: in whirlpools and eddies and the Earth on its axis going round the sun. The rising and falling, the mechanics and physics, it’s all in ballet. People think ballet started with Catherine de’ Medici – no, it’s much deeper than that.”
