From the dancer-filled audience, you’d have thought they were the home team. Certainly interconnections between King’s dancers and Philly companies are numerous enough that the crowd were clearly familiar with them. Mikal Gilbert had danced with both Koresh Dance and with Philadanco, where I remembered him in Tommie-Waheed Evans’ “Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth.” And Adji Cissoko had a choreographic residency with BalletX in 2021. I noted dancers of all three companies, past and present, there to cheer old friends.

The camaraderie in the house warmed me up for a celestial evening of two of King’s most recent choreographies. The opening dance, “Legacy,” premiered last spring at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, with Grammy winner, bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding playing her music composition live onstage. Here, we had a recording which began well enough, but without the movement of Spalding’s colorfully costumed performance downstage right to soften the recording, its 16 sections sometimes grated with redundancies. 

Still, the involute wordplay on line and age and astonishing dancing, often with subtle animalistic imagery, led us to the final sections, “Home” and “Your Lineal Seed.” Gorgeous costuming by Robert Rosenwasser had the men frequently bare-chested and in swirling skirts. Gilbert, high on demi-toe, arms upraised and one leg bent, like a flamingo, as the company men lay prone backs to us, one arm raised as if to swim to a far shore.