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)

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Dante on their minds: Da-On Dance presents "Thirst"

Da-On Dance
(photo by Darren Hoffman)

Choreographer Jin Ju Song-Begin tells us that the name of her year-old modern dance troupe, Da-On Dance, refers to the Korean words for "all good things are coming." The company presented the world premiere of her first evening-length piece, Thirst, last night as part of Danspace Project's DANCE:Access program, and it shows that those words might be good to bear in mind for a while.

Influenced by themes from Dante's Inferno, the hour-long work has fleeting moments of concentrated interest--massing, bee swarm sounds played live by composer Jerome Begin and cellist Loren Dempster; silhouetted dancers stepping into feeble pools of light of their own making; a chorus of self-flagellants who inject the piece with much-needed fire; and Song-Begin's own unforgiving slashes across space. The piece is at its best when revealing her to be its supercharged engine. Her dancers capably present the shapes and overall dynamics of movement but do not seem to be living it from the inside. The map of Hell is not hell itself. If I'm overly distracted by the looks of them--even down to hairstyles--I'm not in the dance with them. For Da-On Dance, only time will tell.

with Esmé Boyce, Giulia Carotenuto, David Gonsier, Breanna Gribble, Karen Harvey, KyounJoon Lee and Elliott Reiland

Original score by Jerome Begin performed with Loren Dempster

Da-On Dance continues its run at Danspace Project tonight and tomorrow night at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street (corner Second Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Theater of War

Set me as a seal upon your heart. For love is strong as death.

(Song of Solomon)

Bill T. Jones's Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray—which has concluded its New York premiere run at Rose Theater for the Lincoln Center Festival—is a work of heartbroken yet tenacious, resilient love.

Given its world premiere at Illinois's Ravinia Festival in 2009--the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth--this 90-minute, multimedia piece takes inspiration from the life and milieu of this American icon. But before leading us to Lincoln, Jones first draws our attention to Shayla-Vie Jenkins, a lovely Black woman dancing on a circular, spotlit extension of the main stage. She flows with delicate elegance through a seamless pattern of movements as a voice-over recording itemizes parts of the human body, from head to toe.

I am a Black woman, too, and as the voice calmly, caressingly listed these parts, my mind quickly flicked to the blood memory of the slave auction block. That thought flickered out just as swiftly, for I sensed that Jones wanted us to hold two other thoughts in reasonable balance. The first, to be sure, is that illusory, ephemeral flow of dance. The second is the sweaty, effortful reality that gives rise to dance, the discrete bodily structures working in concert to make the fantasy possible. With the auction image gone, I found this juxtaposition almost unbearably moving, a tribute not only to dance and dancers but also to the notion of the democratic body politic, forged from so many individual entities, each with distinct identity, history and concerns. Is the American ideal of a strong, united people capable of respect and harmony, a dream as illusory as a body dancing on a stage?

In examining the life of our nation's heroic, martyred president, Jones has said, he grappled with Lincoln's human complexities. This work touches upon some incidents from Lincoln's biography, including his assassination, but it does not engage with that complexity in any way specific to the man himself. Jones seems far more interested in repeatedly pulling back from Lincoln to afford a better view of the restless ghosts from those times that now float through our own. He recognizes something potentially dangerous—and because he's got an artist's courageous heart, potentially redeeming—in the flaring contentiousness of our political life today, when a man of African and European-American heritage now sits at the head of a country that once enslaved African people.

Long stretches of Fondly Do We Hope's ensemble movement, as well as some choreography for individuals, puzzled me. Most notably, Paul Matteson—who often assumes the Lincoln role—seemed, at best, unrelievedly pleasant. Matteson's moves are big and flung; he is hoisted and ported by the ensemble, as if riding atop a throne of marble. But this performer never transcends blandness, even when engaged in heated debate. But if Jones's movement had been more expressive in itself, it's still not clear that Matteson would possess the command to carry it. On the other hand, Asli Bulbul (in and out of her role as Mary Todd Lincoln) and Jennifer Nugent, like Jenkins, make the most of movement pieces that are perfectly cut, polished and displayed. I am tempted to think that Jones's intentions snap into sharper focus when the dancer is female, but Jenkins, Bulbul and especially the always interesting Nugent, really bring oomph to the challenge.

Although the choreography largely disappoints, the score astonishes. Jerome Begin, Christopher Antonio William Lancaster and George Lewis, Jr. contribute a rich blend of Americana in their original compositions and arrangements of traditional music, with delightfully beautiful singing by Clarissa Sinceno and Lewis. I appreciate the reticent simplicity of Bjorn Amelan's set design. The filmy, translucent curtain encircling the main stage reminded me of a screen pulled closed around the bed of a hospitalized patient, perhaps one injured in our Civil War or in Afghanistan. For long stretches, this curtain distanced us from the enclosed dancing ensemble.

Democracy can look like chaos. Is the body politic ill, broken? Is it actually in the frightening throes of a healing crisis? The visitor quietly entering a hospital room, wants to protect, to be gentle with, the patient suffering or recovering within.

Stay me, comfort me. For I am sick of love.

(Song of Solomon)

When Amelan's tender curtain parts, revealing a stand of white columns, it demarcates hallowed space set apart for the exercise of the ancient Greek ideals adopted by the founders of this nation. I wonder if we are still capable of “believing in great men,” as Jones says of himself in the work's text. I wonder, indeed, if believing in some great man out there is exactly what we need to be doing right now, but I trust Jones has entertained that thought, too.

“Lincoln is a story we tell ourselves,” says Jones's narrator, Jamyl Dobson. And just as Americans continue to interrogate and refine this narrative, Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray reportedly has been much reworked since its world premiere last year at Ravinia. Despite visual beauty in design and performance, the work is blunted by choreography dissociated from the work's complex ideas and copious text.

Lincoln Center Festival continues through next Sunday, July 25. For a schedule of the remaining programs and ticketing information, click here.