Next at the Kennedy Center: "Alonzo King: Deep River" (John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Death in Paradise KPBS was supposed to run a Live at the Belly Up episode featuring a local band called Tim Flannery and the Lunatic Fringe, but instead the screen went blank for about three minutes and when the programming resumed, they were showing something else. The something else turned out to be part of a Next at the Kennedy Center episode featuring Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet company (the all-caps on “LINES” is in the actual name) doing performances of short ballets based on the traditional African-American songs “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and “Deep River.” “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was composed in 1900 by Black American poet James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother, John Rosamond Johnson. It’s been referred to as the “Negro National Anthem” but it’s not a song I particularly like and I’d much rather have seen a song by Duke Ellington, like “Come Sunday,” be hailed as the African-American national anthem instead. Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet turned out to be quite impressive, consisting of scantily clad dancers of both mainstream genders and a variety of racial backgrounds. The two sexiest guys in the company were a Black man and a young man of almost unearthly beauty who was shirtless and looked vaguely Latino. He also had a number of tattoos on his body – texts rather than images – which just added to his sexiness.

The dancers performed to live accompaniment featuring a middle-aged heavy-set Black woman singer who performed the songs with far more emotion and soul than “Lift Every Voice and Sing” usually gets – I actually found myself liking it for virtually the first time ever – and who walked around the back of the stage during the performance, not really dancing but still physically a part of the proceedings. Her accompanist at the piano, concealed in the orchestra pit, was Alonzo King himself, and he plucked at the strings of the piano as well as playing it normally for a rather unearthly effect. The dancing was quite athletic and a mostly successful fusion of ballet and modern dance; the women were obliged to dance mostly “en pointe” (ballet-speak for dancing on tip-toes) while the men got more athletic modern-dance moves that showed off their musculatures. I’m not sure whether we got to see the entire show or only the last half-hour of it; the musical credits included names like Maurice Ravel and Pharoah Sanders who didn’t seem to be in evidence in the segment we saw, but the show’s imdb.com page only credited a performance of “Deep River.” The Wikipedia page on Alonzo King lists 76 ballets he created between 1983 and 2013 (there’s no more recent listings for the works, though King has apparently kept working and the list doesn’t include “Lift Every Voice” or “Deep River”), some based on Black culture and some on white classical music. There’s even a piece called “Coleman Hawkins,” and I’m curious whether this is just a dance set to some of Hawkins’s records or it actually attempts to depict him and his struggles dramatically.