Let me be clear about something: Deep River works. It fucking works. But not because every element is worth a damn. It works because Alonzo King and Lisa Fischer have something real, something that cuts through the usual artist-meets-artist mutual noise.
Alonzo doesn’t use Lisa Fischer as a voice. He listens. She doesn’t just sing to the choreography, she’s in genuine conversation with it, a dialogue that’s taken years to build. You can see it: the way the dancers respond to her phrasing, the way she holds a note and bodies suspend mid-air, waiting. It’s years of artistic dialogue distilled into movement and sound. That relationship, that’s the spine of the whole thing.
Misrach made his name shooting deserts and environmental collapse. Fine. Deserved, even. But these projections? This is the visual equivalent of Enya. Soft-focus landscapes. Ambient nature porn. The kind of imagery you’d see in a Marriott lobby, behind a TED talk about “finding your authentic self”, or behind some Silicon Valley exec’s LinkedIn headshot. It’s pretty. It’s safe. It’s utterly forgettable.
It’s not just aesthetically bankrupt, it’s a technical catastrophe.
They wash out the dancers in sickly cyan and amber, creating flat, muddy tones that make human skin look either radioactive or necrotic. The contrast is fucked. One minute you’ve got workable light, the next you’re shooting into what looks like a Windows XP screensaver having an existential crisis.
It’s hack work dressed up in art-world credibility.
But here’s the thing: Fischer and King are so good, so ruthlessly committed to the work, that they drag this whole production forward. The dancers, these freakish athletes with their impossible lines and their bodies that shouldn’t exist in nature, they’re not competing with the projections. They’re ignoring them. Dancing through them like they’re weather. Like they’re just one more obstacle to transcend on the way to something true.
Moran’s compositions do the other half of the rescue operation. Complex, uncompromising jazz that meets Fischer’s gospel power head-on without flinching. When Fischer opens her mouth, when those first notes come out, when the dancers respond… that’s when you remember why you’re in the room. That’s when the corporate wellness retreat playing on the walls behind them becomes irrelevant background noise.
As a photographer, you make a choice: document the flawed whole or isolate what actually matters. I chose the bodies. The faces. The moment Fischer’s voice and those dancers’ movements become the same thing. Let someone else shoot the pretty pictures projected on the wall. I’m there for the thing that can’t be repeated, the thing that lives once and then dies.
That’s the only job worth doing.
As artists, which we all are, our obsession is to crumble the veils of delusion, to make the invisible apparent, and to see behind all appearance. If I’ve come to a realization where I’ve left the sense of ‘me‘, and expanded to the sense of ‘we’, finally stepping into the idea of ‘oneness’, how can I exploit a mountain? How can I exploit a people? Because I realize that people and that mountain, is me. That ocean that is being polluted is me.
Alonzo King