Memory, Reclamation, and the Depths of Deep River
Photography Courtesy of Artist
In an era of escalating political division, cultural erasure, and the dismantling of civil liberties, Deep River arrives not merely as performance, but as a vessel of survival and hope. Created following the COVID-19 pandemic and amid national reckonings on race, Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet offers more than dance: it's balm and a call to remembrance.
Its resonance was amplified by a national PBS broadcast in October 2024, bringing its message to a wider audience during the unnerving lead-up to a deeply consequential election. That context feels inescapable. The last time I visited the Meany Center for Caleb Teicher & Conrad Tao’s Counterpoint, it was just days after Donald Trump assumed control of the Kennedy Center, initiating mass removals of appointees and reshaping a cultural institution in his image.
To return now, three months into his second term, with civil rights and public arts facing ideological rollback, felt hauntingly cyclical.
But where policy erodes, performance resists.
"The body is a container of memory." — Alonzo King in an interview with the Santa Barbara IndependentDeep River meets these tensions head-on, inviting us to remember not only who we are, but who we must continue to be.
Alonzo King, renowned for fusing ballet with diverse influences, explores profound themes through dance. Deep River, premiered May 13, 2022, for LINES Ballet’s 40th anniversary, exemplifies this. Its continued presence in major venues underscores its engagement with themes of memory and resilience. Deep River doesn’t just interpret spirituals—it communes with them, moving through grief, resistance, and transcendence like a ritual passed down, channeling cultural memory into motion.
This ballet is built not on narrative but invocation. Through music, movement, and breath, it asks what it means to survive with grace when the world offers little, how to carry buried history not as weight, but lifeline. As King noted, “the body is a container of memory,” and here, that memory is awakened—not as artifact, but force.
What unfolds is less performance than meditative offering. At times, I found myself entranced, the boundaries between movement and music dissolving, until the sharp, deliberate breaths of the dancers pulled me back. Those raw, human moments became reminders that presence, not precision, was the true architecture here.
Running just over an hour without intermission, Deep River unfolds as interwoven vignettes anchored in African American spirituals. Jason Moran’s jazz compositions form the score’s backbone, layered with field recordings, gospel textures, and Lisa Fischer’s unmistakable voice—less accompaniment than embodiment, drifting between reverence and rawness.
King’s partnership with Moran spans over a decade, marked by blurring genre boundaries. Moran, working at the nexus of jazz, visual art, and Black cultural memory, brings a sonic architecture that feels both rooted and experimental, provoking movement rather than just supporting it. Likewise, Fischer, previously in King’s The Propelled Heart (2015), brings intimacy and power honed over decades touring with icons and a subsequent solo career. In Deep River, her Grammy-winning voice isn’t background; it’s gravity.
Deep River feels uniquely multigenerational. Weaving ballet with sacred music, King aligns his work with a lineage reaching from enslaved voices to the fractured present. The piece doesn’t reconstruct history; it reanimates it.
It begins in shadow. Bodies emerge slowly, with reverence, summoned rather than staged. No central figure, just shared presence. The choreography resists symmetry, spiraling and folding like memory—circular, layered. Dancers sink into the floor or reach skyward with an urgency less like escape than reclamation.
Lighting plays a quiet, insistent role. Designed with striking restraint—no projections, only focused light, shadow, practical effects—it felt, as someone with a visual design background, intentionally analogue and human. Light didn't just illuminate; it sculpted, carving dancers from darkness, defining negative space that lived and breathed, shifting the stage from sanctuary to threshold to riverbed. Costumes by Robert Rosenwasser—soft, earth-toned fabrics moving like echoes—enhanced this fluidity, blurring lines between body, spirit, and era. Even moments of stillness hummed with potential.
Deep River doesn’t dramatize liberation; it inhabits the ongoing struggle to remember it, offering no easy resolution, only the insistence that movement itself can be resistance, reverence, return. It draws from the deep well of spirituals—not as musical sources, but as encoded testimony, tools of survival, living documents of endurance.
When dancers move to “Wade in the Water,” associated with coded messages on the Underground Railroad (Library of Congress), the gesture is an act of remembrance, an embodied echo of migration and passage. In its refusal to resolve, its repetition and recursion, the work mirrors historical trauma: nonlinear, unclean, unfinished. It speaks to present displacement, erased memory, ideological rollback—insisting on the fact of survival, and its beautiful, brutal cost.
Much of Deep River’s power lies in its ensemble. The cast brought an intensity forged in shared breath, a collective invocation. The choreography amplified individuality within the group: spirals diverged, bodies collapsed differently, reaching toward different horizons. Presence, multiplied.
Fischer’s voice moved *through* the dancers, her phrasing rising and falling with their breath, turning musicality spatial. Moran’s score offered counterweight: unstable, surprising, yet grounded. Together, they formed an ether around the choreography—unseen but felt. Performance became porous; the dancers didn't just embody the work, they carried it.
Near the end, a profound stillness fell. Not silence—there were still breaths—but a shared stillness, held collectively, folding time itself. That’s what Deep River does: it draws you in, leaves you unmoored, open, listening. And something starts to echo. Memory.
Even now, I keep returning to the light: a dancer just outside the core, motioning toward someone unseen; the shape of breath on skin; the decision not to spotlight, but sculpt shadow. It reminded me why live performance matters. Why presence matters. Why gathering for honest art, especially now, is resistance.
Deep River doesn’t tell a story; it channels one. It doesn't resolve; it resounds. King offers an invitation—into memory, movement, witness. At a time when cultural institutions are hollowed out, history rewritten, arts treated as luxury, works like this remind us what’s at stake, and what’s possible.
Because Deep River is survival rehearsed. The choice to witness it—to sit in stillness, moved by breath—is its own quiet refusal: to forget, disengage, or stop listening.
Learn More About Alonzo King LINES Ballet
Follow Meany Center on Instagram
Follow Alonzo King LINES Ballet on Instagram
Its resonance was amplified by a national PBS broadcast in October 2024, bringing its message to a wider audience during the unnerving lead-up to a deeply consequential election. That context feels inescapable. The last time I visited the Meany Center for Caleb Teicher & Conrad Tao’s Counterpoint, it was just days after Donald Trump assumed control of the Kennedy Center, initiating mass removals of appointees and reshaping a cultural institution in his image.
To return now, three months into his second term, with civil rights and public arts facing ideological rollback, felt hauntingly cyclical.
But where policy erodes, performance resists.
"The body is a container of memory." — Alonzo King in an interview with the Santa Barbara IndependentDeep River meets these tensions head-on, inviting us to remember not only who we are, but who we must continue to be.
Alonzo King, renowned for fusing ballet with diverse influences, explores profound themes through dance. Deep River, premiered May 13, 2022, for LINES Ballet’s 40th anniversary, exemplifies this. Its continued presence in major venues underscores its engagement with themes of memory and resilience. Deep River doesn’t just interpret spirituals—it communes with them, moving through grief, resistance, and transcendence like a ritual passed down, channeling cultural memory into motion.
This ballet is built not on narrative but invocation. Through music, movement, and breath, it asks what it means to survive with grace when the world offers little, how to carry buried history not as weight, but lifeline. As King noted, “the body is a container of memory,” and here, that memory is awakened—not as artifact, but force.
What unfolds is less performance than meditative offering. At times, I found myself entranced, the boundaries between movement and music dissolving, until the sharp, deliberate breaths of the dancers pulled me back. Those raw, human moments became reminders that presence, not precision, was the true architecture here.
Running just over an hour without intermission, Deep River unfolds as interwoven vignettes anchored in African American spirituals. Jason Moran’s jazz compositions form the score’s backbone, layered with field recordings, gospel textures, and Lisa Fischer’s unmistakable voice—less accompaniment than embodiment, drifting between reverence and rawness.
King’s partnership with Moran spans over a decade, marked by blurring genre boundaries. Moran, working at the nexus of jazz, visual art, and Black cultural memory, brings a sonic architecture that feels both rooted and experimental, provoking movement rather than just supporting it. Likewise, Fischer, previously in King’s The Propelled Heart (2015), brings intimacy and power honed over decades touring with icons and a subsequent solo career. In Deep River, her Grammy-winning voice isn’t background; it’s gravity.
Deep River feels uniquely multigenerational. Weaving ballet with sacred music, King aligns his work with a lineage reaching from enslaved voices to the fractured present. The piece doesn’t reconstruct history; it reanimates it.
It begins in shadow. Bodies emerge slowly, with reverence, summoned rather than staged. No central figure, just shared presence. The choreography resists symmetry, spiraling and folding like memory—circular, layered. Dancers sink into the floor or reach skyward with an urgency less like escape than reclamation.
Lighting plays a quiet, insistent role. Designed with striking restraint—no projections, only focused light, shadow, practical effects—it felt, as someone with a visual design background, intentionally analogue and human. Light didn't just illuminate; it sculpted, carving dancers from darkness, defining negative space that lived and breathed, shifting the stage from sanctuary to threshold to riverbed. Costumes by Robert Rosenwasser—soft, earth-toned fabrics moving like echoes—enhanced this fluidity, blurring lines between body, spirit, and era. Even moments of stillness hummed with potential.
Deep River doesn’t dramatize liberation; it inhabits the ongoing struggle to remember it, offering no easy resolution, only the insistence that movement itself can be resistance, reverence, return. It draws from the deep well of spirituals—not as musical sources, but as encoded testimony, tools of survival, living documents of endurance.
When dancers move to “Wade in the Water,” associated with coded messages on the Underground Railroad (Library of Congress), the gesture is an act of remembrance, an embodied echo of migration and passage. In its refusal to resolve, its repetition and recursion, the work mirrors historical trauma: nonlinear, unclean, unfinished. It speaks to present displacement, erased memory, ideological rollback—insisting on the fact of survival, and its beautiful, brutal cost.
Much of Deep River’s power lies in its ensemble. The cast brought an intensity forged in shared breath, a collective invocation. The choreography amplified individuality within the group: spirals diverged, bodies collapsed differently, reaching toward different horizons. Presence, multiplied.
Fischer’s voice moved *through* the dancers, her phrasing rising and falling with their breath, turning musicality spatial. Moran’s score offered counterweight: unstable, surprising, yet grounded. Together, they formed an ether around the choreography—unseen but felt. Performance became porous; the dancers didn't just embody the work, they carried it.
Near the end, a profound stillness fell. Not silence—there were still breaths—but a shared stillness, held collectively, folding time itself. That’s what Deep River does: it draws you in, leaves you unmoored, open, listening. And something starts to echo. Memory.
Even now, I keep returning to the light: a dancer just outside the core, motioning toward someone unseen; the shape of breath on skin; the decision not to spotlight, but sculpt shadow. It reminded me why live performance matters. Why presence matters. Why gathering for honest art, especially now, is resistance.
Deep River doesn’t tell a story; it channels one. It doesn't resolve; it resounds. King offers an invitation—into memory, movement, witness. At a time when cultural institutions are hollowed out, history rewritten, arts treated as luxury, works like this remind us what’s at stake, and what’s possible.
Because Deep River is survival rehearsed. The choice to witness it—to sit in stillness, moved by breath—is its own quiet refusal: to forget, disengage, or stop listening.
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