His A.I.M. is true: Kyle Abraham's Joyce season

Claude CJ Johnson, Connie Shiau and Catherine Ellis Kirk
of A.I.M. perform Kyle Abraham's Drive.
(photo: Ian Douglas)

No half-measures. No uncertainty. Kyle Abraham is at The Joyce Theater this week with his newly-renamed troupe, A.I.M., doing things to the max.

This season--which makes room for dances by Doug Varone and Bebe Miller, world premieres by Andrea Miller and Abraham as well as the Joyce commission of his first solo performance in nearly a decade--feels like a bold announcement of a new phase in the life and career of this award-winning artist. In an opening-night audience packed with New York's dance notables and media, it also felt like the place to be.

Program A opens with the Miller trio, state, where a knife-sharp trio of Black women--Kayla Farrish, Catherine Ellis Kirk and Marcella Lewis, with whom Miller collaborated--splash their stark images, live or via looming shadows, against the pale glow of a backdrop. They resemble stylish fashion models distorting their bodies out of mundane functionality into nifty abstractions for the eye of photographers and magazine readers; a fascination grows with the hypnotic observation of their physical capabilities and precision design, their aggressive flair. Reggie Wilkins's music underscores a certain sci-fi otherworldliness in this picture as does Nicole Pearce's lighting design--but she's got even more astonishing ideas for Abraham's solo, INDY.

Created with composer-pianist Jerome Begin, INDY is a work of emergence, search and breakthrough, as moving as it is beautiful to behold. It reveals itself slowly, literally coming out of mist. In its early moments, I see aspects of the dancer I remember from way back: part b-boy/part voguer, the latter's effortlessly slinky moves a form of catnip for this audience. (Let me pause, a minute, to throw a few !!!s behind the name of designer Karen Young whose black slacks/top costume, with its thick bands of fringe, throws more than a few !!!s around Abraham's gyrations: Karen Young!!!). But with the spreading of his arms and the parting of the black curtain behind him, Abraham moves on from this image of himself.

We find him shuddering, his arms locked behind his back as if his wrists are handcuffed. Pearce's lighting, here and throughout, arrives from the oddest places and in the strangest ways. She is a fount of surprises, stepping up to the challenge of choreographer ready to surprise himself and all who follow him. Begin's sound chamber suddenly erupts in an audio clip of a voice announcing Abraham's BFA graduation. The dancer strips down to briefs to move around like an awkward, broken marionnette.

The work's fully-revealed, eye-popping visual design suggests a well-ordered cosmos--external and containing the dancer or internal and generative of his evolution, perhaps both. The Abraham we see now has unshackled himself from our and, likely, his own expectations.

With Meditation: A Silent Prayer, another Abraham world premiere, made in collaboration with his performers, the choreographer returns to a concern that has informed his works in previous years--the precarious existence of Black lives in white supremacist society; specifically, the unrelenting roll call of deaths of Blacks at the hands of police. The ensemble gently performs moments of human connection before Titus Kaphar's backdrop-spanning mural of what, at first, might seem to be looming images of three distinct Black faces. Instead, you come to realize, the three are blurs made to look like multiple, overlapped and moving faces. We hear a litany of ages, family roles and names, written and read in voiceover by artist Carrie Mae Weems. In addition to Kaphar and Weems, the notable creative team for Meditation includes Craig Harris (music), Dan Scully (lighting) and Young (costumes).

This program--as well as Program B--ends with Drive, an Abraham collaboration with A.I.M. which was a hit of the 2017 Fall for Dance Festival at City Center. More tight work by the ensemble, more stunning lighting by Scully, and the asserted conviction that--when ready--you can just pick up and go wherever you choose to go. A.I.M. is ready.

Performers:

Kyle Abraham, Kayla Farrish, Catherine Ellis Kirk, Marcella Lewis, Tamisha Guy, Keerati Jinakunwiphat, Jeremy "Jae" Neal, Matthew Baker and Claude "CJ" Johnson

****

A.I.M.'s Joyce season runs through Sunday, May 6 with two programs and varying start times as follows:

Program A (approx. 1hr 40 min)

Tuesday (7:30pm), Friday (8pm) and Saturday (2pm)

state (World Premiere) by Andrea Miller
INDY (World Premiere) by Kyle Abraham
Meditation: A Silent Prayer (World Premiere) by Kyle Abraham
Drive by Kyle Abraham

Program B (approx. 1 hr 20 min)

Wednesday (7:30pm), Thursday and Saturday (8pm) and Sunday (2pm)

Strict Love by Doug Varone
Habits of Attraction by Bebe Miller
Meditation: A Silent Prayer (World Premiere) by Kyle Abraham
Drive by Kyle Abraham

For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Subscribe in a reader

DTW: Paper or plastic?

On Saturday night, the shared program of Kyle Abraham (of Abraham.In.Motion) and Layard Thompson drew one of the coolest audiences I've seen at Dance Theater Workshop--or anywhere--in a long time. If I could put in an order for more of the same, all around New York's dance scene, I would. But, then again, how diverse did this audience turn out to be when some of Abraham's followers left in the break before Thompson's half of the show? (Oh, well...) In any case, both of these artists made strong impressions over the course of an evening that, under normal circumstances, would have felt--and, indeed, would have been--way, way, way too long. Somehow, both of these guys pulled it off. How?

Abraham. Folks should rush to sign up to dance for him. I certainly would. With an assist from costumer Sarah Cubbage and lighting/projection designer Dan Scully, Abraham creates environments--no, havens--for the human body that show it off to startling effect. Witness his solo Brick, its multiple, moody aesthetic layers--minstrel-like stereotypes writ monumental, floating Afro wigs, black skin coated in jet-black grease paint, moody Japanese landscapes, crime-scene outline graffiti, a collaged soundscape of irresistible hip hop rhythms with highly-resistible hip hop lyrics--and the way it stuns you and suspends you in a light trance poised between avoidance and indulgence. A solo, sinuous and jarring, all of it coming at you, illogically, in waves of elegance. A haunted performance by a young yet confident performer, one who shows himself, in The Dripping Kind, his ensemble piece, to have a keen eye, serious discipline and incomprehensible originality. Whenever Abraham sets anything before you, be sure to keep track of stuff going on in the margins. He will color outside the box. I suspect we will have to reckon with this rising artist in coming years.

Thompson. The boundary-less Id that crashed the party. Propelling himself down DTW's stairs in a noisy, ruffly dress constructed from a gathering of used paper coffee cups. Thompson flopping and levitating. Chanting and burping. Shedding his shell-like dress and inner cocoon-like layers of plastic baggage. Cup...puC......K......Ohhhh, Beauty, full, vessel: Holy ritual. Wholly, a tantrum. Thompson is a child unsupervised, only sporadically self-conscious. Or, perhaps, Thompson is Mother Earth Herself, keening and flailing like a oil-soaked cormorant, wacked out and desperate to get out from under. Borderline. Some people tittered, but it's really painful (and potentially transformative) to watch with an open heart. Like Abraham, Thompson gathers collaborators who go full-tilt with him--in this case, lighting designer Chloë Z Brown and costumer Machine P.H.D. (Pixie Harlot Dazzle). The world they conjure--which is to say, our world of consumption, excess and heedless destruction--is completely mirrored in Thompson's risk-taking performance. Risky to body and damn challenging to an audience who, among other things, must witness the performer turning a spreading puddle of urine into a prop. Tempting to say that Thompson doesn't know when to stop, that Cup ranneth over numerous times and could have--should have--ended at any point along the way. But the man gave his all, and then some, and it all fit his intention. I'd call that a success.