Too often ballet is reduced to its surface details—pink satin, tulle, long legs—and presented as a glittering, featherweight ideal of human perfection: the ultimate escapist art. In the vision of Alonzo King, however, ballet recovers its bass notes and speaks of human suffering and compassion. This is a choreographer who is not afraid to stick his hands in the muck of human experience and craft something beautiful out of what he finds there. His work demands that his dancers call on every ounce of technical skill that they possess—and it’s a considerable amount—while also stumbling, shuddering, collapsing, and teetering, weaving images of the universal struggle to bring our best selves into the world. The result is work with both brilliance and depth—ballet in which we can see ourselves, as we are and as we'd like to be.