Photo by Chris Hardy

There are moments in Alonzo King LINES Ballet’s spring program when it feels less like a performance and more like something alive, responsive, and just slightly unpredictable.

That energy is most palpable in LEGACY—The Immeasurable Immensity of Your Inheritance, the company’s collaboration with Esperanza Spalding, who performs live onstage. Positioned to the side but never secondary, Spalding doesn’t accompany the dancers so much as engage them, teasing, provoking, and at times seeming to pull movement out of them mid-phrase.

And they respond. It’s not clean call-and-response. It’s messier than that, in a good way. The dancers push back, interrupt, stretch the timing, or drop into something quieter. The result feels like a conversation you’re watching take shape as it happens.

As Adji Cissoko, Alonzo King LINES associate artistic director and principal dancer described it, “It really feels like we are speaking… we are in dialogue.”

That dialogue is evident immediately in the opening sections, where the movement resists spectacle in favor of something more grounded, weighted, relational, and almost effortful. A recurring motif of collapse and recovery: bodies falling, caught, lifted, then falling again, threads through the work, building into a central duet between Cissoko and Shuaib Elhassan that feels less like partnering and more like survival.

They hold each other up.
Then fail.
Then try again.

Photo by Chris Hardy

Over and over, the choreography returns to that question: what does it take to carry and be carried?

Spalding’s presence sharpens that tension. Her bass lines pulse underneath the movement, while her voice moves between wordless phrases and fragments of text that feel both intimate and insistent. At times, it’s as if she’s directing the dancers; at others, it feels like they’re directing her.

Or maybe neither.

“There’s a connection… we don’t let go of each other,” Cissoko tells me..

That sense of connection, imperfect, shifting, but constant, anchors the piece. Even in moments of humor or looseness, there’s an undercurrent of urgency, a reminder that this isn’t just aesthetic. It’s about inheritance, about what we carry in our bodies whether we choose to or not.

The program’s second half, Ode to Alice Coltrane, moves into a different register entirely. Set to the music of Alice Coltrane, the work opens in near-darkness, dancers low to the ground, listening'; literally pressing their ears toward the floor before rising.

If Legacy feels grounded and relational, Ode expands outward.

The choreography stretches vertically, reaching, beseeching, dissolving into space. Dancers often move without touching, connected instead through timing, through shared phrasing, through something less visible. At one point, a ripple passes across the stage, torsos rolling one after the other like a current moving through water. Later, bodies skim the floor as if swimming, the stage transforming into something fluid, transitional.

Where Legacy asks what we carry, Ode seems to ask where we’re going.

And yet the two works don’t feel disconnected. If anything, they echo each other: one rooted in lineage, the other in something more expansive, even cosmic. Together, they trace a kind of arc: from inheritance to release, from body to atmosphere.

Cissoko, who opens Legacy and returns at the end of the evening, becomes a throughline between the two. Her movement carries both weight and clarity, grounded but never heavy, expansive without losing precision.

“It’s larger than just us,” she said. “We are all these particles… affecting each other.”

That idea lingers long after the final moments of Ode, when the stage empties and the movement dissolves but the feeling remains; something shared, something still in motion.

Less like a finished piece, or more like a conversation that hasn’t ended yet.