Alonzo King LINES Ballet, from San Francisco, is one of the great African American ballet companies. Alonzo King is one of the great choreographers of our time.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet in New York City
Alonzo King LINES Ballet performs “Deep River” (2022) a spiritual piece from the pandemic, with MacArthur Fellow composer Jason Moran and Grammy Award-winning vocalist Lisa Fischer in the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center; Thursday-Saturday, February 22-24, 2024 at 7:30pm. $35 suggested with options. lincolncenter.org 🇺🇸
Jason Moran is a jazz pianist and composer. The Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center was purpose built for jazz, so this is a great theater for this performance.
The spiritual score reaches into Black, Jewish, and Indian traditions. Black and Jewish communities share the experience of having been enslaved and then rising above it all. In New York City, we grew up together in the same neighborhoods. India is the home of many spiritual traditions, and looking there for inspiration is not a stretch. One of the early major trading routes followed the monsoon winds between East Africa and India, so there are many East Africans with an Indian heritage. In the Caribbean, especially in Trinidad and Tobago, Indian, African, and Indigenous mixed together. That’s why we have good curry at New York Carnival and the West Indian Day Parade.
King choreographed “Deep River” for LINES ballet’s 40th anniversary. across three years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Remember that? We were all so lonely and afraid. It was also a time when the police lynching of George Floyd, made most Americans feel the full shame of our original sin. That terrible nine minutes was the catalyst for what we call the Harlem Renaissance 3.0, a flowering of the Black Arts in the United States. Artists of color are getting opportunities in New York City that we never got before. It’s the good that hope creates out of something bad.
King says “Deep River is a call to keep hope, to make the lotus bloom in the mud, and to look at each other as a family of souls.” Sometimes at the end of the day, all we have is hope, but hope leads us forward. Contemplating the lotus blooming in the mud is a call to the divine to help us create beauty from nothing. The lotus is a symbol of purity, enlightenment, self-regeneration, and rebirth. Seeing each other as a family of souls is the ultimate goal, a counter to the culture of separation Americans inherited from our English colonizers.
Cultural Context of the Deep River
A deep river is a grand metaphor of life, the flow of time, and wisdom hidden in its depths for those who will risk the deep dive.
When an African American speaks of rivers, you can’t help but think of Langston Hughes’ famous poem from the Harlem Renaissance, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921). It references the Euphrates River where civilization began, the Nile River where civilization developed, the Congo River where a lot of African Diaspora culture comes from, and the Mississippi River, the great river of the United States, and an indelible influence on the African American experience.
The blues, the root of the popular music and dances of the United States, comes from the Mississippi River Delta. The blues is an American rendition of North African cultural traditions. Jazz is from New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. In 1810, half the population of New Orleans was Haitian Diaspora. Haiti is one of the taproots of African Diaspora culture in the Americas.
In many world cultures, water is sacred. It’s something we can’t live without. Life rose out of the seas, rivers, and swamps. We are born out of amniotic fluid, which is our mother’s own water. The African Diaspora in the Americas was brought across the ocean in a death and rebirth that changed everything. The Diaspora brought their traditions which included water spirits from many rivers in Mother Afrika, and the Kalûnga from Kongo culture, the watery threshold between the worlds of the living and the dead ancestors.
Water cleans both physically and spiritually, so for all these reasons water is important in African Diaspora culture.
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