Alonzo King LINES Ballet returns to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts with Deep River by company co-founder, artistic director, and visionary choreographer Alonzo King, on Friday, June 9, and Saturday, June 10, 2023, 7:30 pm, in The Wallis’ Bram Goldsmith Theater. The full-length work is set to a score by jazz pianist, composer, and MacArthur Fellow Jason Moran featuring Grammy Award-winning vocalist Lisa Fischer. This is King’s second collaboration with Fischer and his ninth collaboration with Moran, which he created as a part of LINES Ballet’s recent 40th anniversary season. Bending the lines between classical and contemporary ballet, King draws on the strengths of his extraordinary dancers altering the way we look at ballet today. Hailed for its evocative work and unique artistic vision, LINES Ballet adheres to the classical form—the linear, mathematical and geometrical principles deeply rooted in the East-West continuum. An artist talk back will immediately follow the performance on June 9.
Deep River is a call to keep hope and to look at each other as a family of souls. The moving work melds dance with Black spirituals and invites audiences to look at human beings as the pinnacle of creation. King says that on the highest level the work is a reminder that “love is the ocean that we rose from, swim in, and will one day return to — and that love can set us free.”
King added, “As we look back on 40 years of work in the community, in ourselves, the programs, classes, and performances, both live and on film, we recognize that it is the same vision and belief that have carried us to this moment and will continue to carry this organization into the future. We have strived to make obvious that art is the inheritance of every individual, that art activates evolutionary growth, is an intellectual virtue, and the fostering principle for all that is made, done, or known.”
Tickets, $39 to $125, are on sale now. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd, Beverly Hills. To purchase tickets and for more information, please call 310-746-4000 or visit TheWallis.org/Alonzo. The company will also perform Deep River May 27, at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa – scfta.org.