Glenn Ligon on The Great Bieri: "A conduit to the ancestors"

These objects change...a subtle reminder that they operate in a different system.
-- Glenn Ligon

The Artist Project: Glenn Ligon on The Great Bieri
from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Kyle Abraham's season continues: "When the Wolves Came In"

Dancers from
Kyle Abraham's When the Wolves Came In
(photo: Carrie Schneider)

Last Thursday, I reported on Kyle Abraham's other premiere, The Watershed (see here). This week, I saw When the Wolves Came In, Program B of the much-anticipated Kyle Abraham/Abraham.in.Motion season at New York Live Arts. This second evening combines three pieces inspired by the powerful We Insist!: Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, a 1960 album that drew themes from historic struggles for Black freedom in the US and South Africa. As in The Watershed, noted visual artist Glenn Ligon created the smudgy silhouette design that, over time, suggests an uncertain future and erupting turbulence. Grammy® Award-winning jazz pianist Robert Glasper composed the alternately sensuous and wrenching score, including elements of Roach's material, for the final piece. He performs it live with bass player Vicente Archer, drummer Otis Brown III and singer Charenee Wade whose voice evokes both Abbey Lincoln (vocalist on We Insist!) and Nina Simone.

When The Wolves Came In seems an even more ambitious gesture than The Watershed, one that both overreaches and reaches not far enough. The first of the evening's works, When The Wolves Came In, set to choral music by Nico Muhly, employs ballet vocabulary roughed up by contemporary movement accents--like flipped pelvises and twitched hips and female dancers who sometimes pad around on all fours--and disruptive costuming by Reid Bartelme. By disruptive, I mean that, for one thing, the absurdly elongated and plastered-down jet black, copper and blonde wigs that decorate dancers' heads pull much (perhaps too much) attention and curiosity. I felt nothing from (or for) Wolves, finding it unreadable. Should I relax and just appreciate the technique as technique? Should I try to decipher the point of the fanciful costuming? I finally settled for sitting back and letting it all roll past me.

The middle section, Hallowed, honors spirituality via gospel recordings by two Civil Rights movement vocalists, Cleo Kennedy and Bertha Gober. Here, I perked up a bit, mainly because it's impossible to look at Abraham's own complex movement vocabulary without tracing the co-mingled streams of Black diaspora and Black Gay diaspora, and Abraham makes the fluid sensuality and sexuality inherent in Black spirituality and Black spiritual community a little more visible through dancer Jeremy "Jae" Neal in the featured role of this trio. Neal's gorgeous dancing stands out as a model of concentration, the mastery of minute detail and timing. He claims the movement and wears his persona within it very well.

Connie Shiau in The Gettin' from
When the Wolves Came In
(photo: Ian Douglas) 

The Gettin' concludes Wolves, and it takes me back to an impression that I had while looking at The Watershed--that Abraham isn't just setting dance against the visual backdrop of white (and straight) supremacy and Black (and gay) struggle. He is showing up for struggle specifically as a dancer. In Gettin', images from apartheid and of police brutality against demonstrators and other civilians spread across the theater's wall. The work's centerpiece is a lengthy, full-tilt, competitive duet of mostly identical movement shared by Matthew Baker, who is white, and Neal, a Black man. Watching that duet, I thought about how it might feel to devote oneself to such an enveloping, consuming pursuit--training in dance, performing dance, making dance--while the world outside, then as now, reveals its derangement and its beckoning possibilities. How might that outside world and that other inside world flow into one another--for better or for worse?

At times, I'm too distracted by Abraham's facility with movement, his abundance, to feel what he has on his heart--or to feel the connection he has made to all of these iconic images from history and the current moment. Perhaps everything here is moving too fast for me. But I value Abraham's searching, and I would like to understand.

Kyle Abraham/Abraham.in.Motion includes Abraham, Matthew Baker, Winston Dynamite Brown, Tamisha Guy, Catherine Ellis Kirk, Penda N'diaye, Jeremy "Jae" Neal, Jordan Morley and Connie Shiau.

Remaining shows:  Thursday, October 2* and Saturday, October 4 at 7:30pm.
For programming and ticket information, including the closing night benefit party, click here.

*October 2: Stay Late Discussion: Creating When the Wolves Came In - Thomas Lax, Associate Curator, Media and Performance Art at MoMA in conversation with Kyle Abraham and Robert Glasper

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Kyle Abraham's "Watershed" moment

Kyle Abraham (front) and company in The Watershed
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Kyle Abraham's The Watershed is, in no way, a work about opulence in the usual sense.  But at the end of my evening at New York Live Arts, that word quickly came to mind. I guess I mean an opulence of intention, conception, execution. An opulence of confidence. More than just making a new work. Really feeling that, for once, you've got the goods. And there's the deftly coordinated look, across a color spectrum I associate with humble yet versatile clay, of the set (by visual artist Glenn Ligon), lighting (Dan Scully) and costume designs (Karen Young). Your partners got this, too, clicking together all over that stage like the pieces of a solved puzzle. Satisfying. This production is large. My guest said she envisions it at Lincoln Center, but I was thinking BAM.

I have enjoyed KyleAbraham/Abraham.in.Motion without really understanding how the choreographer's female dancers, no matter how focused their presence and rigorous their technique, never seem to pop from their surroundings like the male ones almost always do, and that has not changed. My most vivid memories of The Watershed will always be what men--individually or together--do, even how they radiate a palpable and purposeful individuality when they merely walk out into the space. And that includes Abraham himself, in one scene, sashaying in a satin gown and cottony wig and smearing light concealer all over his face.

Kyle Abraham in a scene from The Watershed
with set by Glenn Ligon
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Far from some overt, linear discourse on America's issue with race (and gender and sexuality), The Watershed appears to have been dreamed up like a series of scrims placed one behind another, each bearing a saturated or filmy stream of visual information. (There's sonic information, too--from Otis Redding to Chopin.) At any moment, you reach in as deep as you want, taking in what the dancers are doing--as dancers, as dancers of different genders, as dancers of different races--and making associations, perhaps according to your generation, your memories, your strongest concerns. The Watershed is, well, watery, a place of integration and transition, a turning point for many currents. Which one will carry you now?

So many ways to swim. Some of the music (Redding) takes me. The choreography, made in collaboration with the dancers, is an abundant--yes, opulent--gush and, true to this troupe's fashion, mercurial and full of flair. ("Beautiful," my guest called it, even as she felt that useful ambivalence about the way artists like Abraham, like Kara Walker, can draw us ever closer to disturbing things--like the most explosive racial stereotypes--by the beauty of their presentation.) When I zoom in on the dancers as dancers, I think I see Abraham quietly shaping an understory about how race plays out in the dance world. If I pull back, I see all of this in a more historical and societal context--literally, as projected images of civil rights demonstrators set upon by police dogs or cops beating a man into the ground play across the stage's wall. And it makes me wonder. The two things--artistic current and societal current--are they, in essence and effect, so different?

In a brief passage that made me ponder this, two Black dancers, contentedly going about the business of dancing, suddenly assume a submissive posture--chests sunken, heads bowed--when a white dancer suddenly enters and stands watching them. He maintains his dominant posture, his silent gaze, just long enough for it to register in our heads as a threat with all kinds of historical resonance. Just long enough. Then--surprise or no surprise--he peaceably slips into formation with them as they all finish out their dance.

If you noticed this moment at all, you might ask, "What did I just see?" Or, "Did I really see that, or did I see it/read it right?" All sorts of slippery stuff like that goes on in The Watershed, where irresistible rhythms and the dancing they inspire pull people of different cultures together. The work is chock full of images--some subtle, some blatant, some proffered with a wicked sense of humor and entitlement--that can only be willfully ignored.

I'm set to see Abraham's other New York Live Arts premiere, When the Wolves Came In, on September 30. More will be revealed.

KyleAbraham/Abraham.in.Motion includes Abraham, Matthew Baker, Winston Dynamite Brown, Tamisha Guy, Catherine Ellis Kirk, Penda N'diaye, Jeremy "Jae" Neal, Jordan Morley and Connie Shiau. Sound design by Sam Crawford.

Remaining performances of The Watershed: Friday, September 26*, Wednesday, October 1, Friday, October 3** at 7:30pm, all reportedly sold out. For additional information, click here.

*September 26 at 6:30pm: Come Early Video Screening and Talk: Visual Artist and Videographer Carrie Schneider discusses her dance on camera collaboration with Kyle Abraham/AIM

*October 3: Stay Late Discussion: Aesthetics of Jazz and the Performance of Protest, moderated by Carrie Mae Weems

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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