Alonzo King LINES Ballet “Deep River.” Photo by Jamie Lyons.
It’s hard to believe that in over 40 years of performing, their appearance last week in the Eisenhower Theater marked San Francisco-based Alonzo King LINES Ballet’s Kennedy Center debut. King is widely regarded as one of the most innovative, sophisticated, and influential choreographers in the history of American contemporary dance and “Deep River” is crafted with as much depth of thought and thoroughness of investigation as I have ever seen. Created over three years in a variety of isolated spaces during the pandemic, “Deep River” unfolded in a trance-like state, woven out of the logic of its own creation.
…crafted with as much depth of thought and thoroughness of investigation as I have ever seen.
In the very first section, “Kaddisch,” four of the dancers in a formation center stage had phrases of movement that began in counterpoint similarity before briefly passing through unison and then spiraling out through a multiverse of different pathways and choices. That set the tone for much of the work, although the same ideas—a fluttering of the hands or a shuffling of the backs of the knees on the floor—kept circling back with a difference. Even though it included a number of unison sections, “Deep River” seemed grounded in a morphic landscape of difference rather than one of lock-step togetherness.
There is a much longer conversation than fits here about what unison movement in dance is and looks like. On one hand there is the almost militaristic unison often exemplified by classical ballets. It’s a kind of unison where all of the shapes, the musicality, and every other detail should be exactly the same. The most recent example of this that I have seen came from the Martha Graham Dance Company in Jamar Robert’s “We the People” at George Mason University. It’s also what American Ballet Theater missed achieving with “Swan Lake” in February.
On the other hand, there is the kind of unison that the LINES dancers found—something that, for lack of a better term, I think of as contemporary unison. The dancers were doing the same steps, feeling and listening to the same music, but because they were feeling the same thing, sometimes the shapes were a little different; because they were hearing the same live music sometimes they found slightly different relationships to the groove. It’s perhaps a more humanistic and expressive approach to unison—a different answer to the problem of how to move in the same way. If you don’t know what you are looking at it might appear a little blurry, but once you see it, it opens up a different, deeper and more expansive experience of the work as it gets diffracted and amplified through the minor differences in the performers’ experiences of it.
The LINES dancers were incredibly musical. With the live performance by pianist and Artistic Director of Jazz at the Kennedy Center and MacArthur Fellow, Jason Moran, and Grammy-winning singer songwriter Lisa Fischer, they had as much to work with as they could want. The musicality had that fabulous collaborative quality that is only possible when the singer and the dancer are each taking their performance to the other from three feet away. The dancers brought the house down with half a dozen bows before the musicians made it to the stage, but Moran and Fischer easily doubled the length of the curtain call.
Jim French’s lighting design for “Deep River” was also exemplary. It felt like a masterclass in how to achieve an evocative look using the simplest techniques. One section, I believe the aptly titled “Follow the Light,” was a textbook example of cool versus warm lighting. The look flipped between a single dancer stage left, lit under cold white and blue specials, and an advancing group from stage right lit in warm glowing amber tones. It’s amazing how much such a basic change can affect the feeling and contextualize the choreography if it’s well deployed.
The Kennedy Center has done an excellent job with this spring’s contemporary dance programming and as we near the end of their ‘23-’24 season it’s hard not to look at “Deep River” in the context of several other recent performances. LINES Ballet is the third international-level company, following Sydney Dance Company’s “Impermanence” in April, and Grupo Corpo’s “Gil Refazendo” in March to perform a roughly hour long, ensemble-heavy dance work that strongly features its connection to an original musical score or arrangement, and that has been imagined or re-imagined over an extended period during the pandemic and in response to it. All three companies have presented vastly different work technically, but it has all been grounded, or at least heavily influenced, by balletic vocabulary. Additionally, “Impermanence” and “Deep River” both featured highly distinctive and prominent lighting design, and music that was a bespoke mix of live and recorded.
It’s impossible to ignore that LINES Ballet’s long overdue Kennedy Center debut marked the American contribution to this sample. It’s interesting to me that while both “Gil Refazendo” and “Impermanence” dealt with an idea of cyclical rebirth, “Deep River” felt like a piece of dance thought rooted in healing and an almost spiritual sense of catharsis in the movement. Where the other works moved at a high velocity and almost constant rate, “Deep River” gave the dancers time to luxuriate in the movement and let it ravel and spiral out. “Gil Refazendo” and “Impermanence” were under pressure, but “Deep River” had a strong, slower current.
It seemed to be a programing statement from the Kennedy Center and LINES Ballet saying that contemporary dance in America is as distinct, sophisticated, skillful, and relevant as it is anywhere else in the world.
Running Time: Approximately one hour with no intermission.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet Presents: “Deep River” ran May 16-18 in the Eisenhower Theater at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F St NW, Washington, DC 20566. For more information and tickets on upcoming events at the Kennedy Center, go online. More information about Alonzo King LINES Ballet is available through their website.
