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
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Uplifting Black choreographers: Gesel Mason

Gesel Mason
(photo: Enoch Chan)

Whoops!

Showing up 45 minutes into a concert because I, somehow, had the wrong curtain time just feels awful. More awful is when it's a historic, keenly-anticipated program like Gesel Mason's No Boundaries: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers.

I missed nearly everything in the first half of the show--works by Bebe Miller, Kyle Abraham and Donald McKayle. <<sound of critic kicking self--hard and repeatedly>> I managed to slip in at a break to catch Rennie Harris's You Are Why! (2014) and watch Mason dance the hell out of it alongside Lisa Engleken and Mahayla Rose. The second half featured works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Bent, 2004), David Roussève (Jumping the Broom, 2005) and a piece by Mason (No Less Black, 2000) with her poetry and MK Abadoo's solo performance. This program has been fifteen years in development and represents both a tribute to a diverse range of Black choreographers and an ongoing gift to dance's future.

Happily, the entire program--a presentation of Gesel Mason Performance Projects, co-presented by 651 ARTS and RestorationART at Brooklyn's Billie Holiday Theatre--will be accessible through the digital archive Mason plans to establish to preserve the legacy of Black artistry in dance. The documentation, just like the concert, will include personable video interviews of the choreographers, revealing the context for understanding how these artists saw and felt about their works when first created and how they view them now.

But try to get to the Billie Holiday tonight-- the show's final evening--for so many, many reasons. Among them is Jumping the Broom with its chilling imagery, prescient warning and the heartbreak of Mason's performance. In the short amount of time he allows himself, Roussève not only conjures vivid scenes in our imagination, he taps our empathy and our sense of foreboding. It is dance as an act of conscience, responsibility and courageous love.

Of course, I cannot speak of Mason's dancing in all of the program's pieces, but I do know she should rank high on your list of artists who jump into the fire of a work with the nimbleness and rigor to survive its flames. She's all up in the Zollar solo (an edgy, dissonant portrait of the extreme state of mind in addiction) and the Harris trio (with its unrelenting movement multiplicities upon complexities upon multiplicities). It's almost unbelievable that she would--and could--program demanding works like these two on the same bill as the Roussève piece. She says, now, that she will never do this again--herself, personally, though the works could be danced by others--and that much is believable.

But, for now--at least this evening--you've got a chance to see a great one at the height of her powers. Go!

For information and tickets to tonight's show (7pm), click here.

The Billie Holiday Theatre
At Restoration Plaza, 1368 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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NEW@Graham: Celebrating a decade of "Lamentation Variations"

Lament not. Janet Eilber plans to keep dreaming up ways to revivify America's longest-running dance troupe, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Graham's famed solo, Lamentations, continues to show the way.

Last evening, the company celebrated the 10th year of Lamentation Variations, its unusual commissioning project launched in 2007 as artistic director Eilber noticed that the season's opening night would fall on the anniversary of 9/11. Since then, Eilber has invited dancemakers, representing a diversity of aesthetic approaches, to respond to or re-imagine the Graham solo. So, Yes to Judson genius Yvonne Rainer rethinking Lamentation or tap genius Michelle Dorrance remixing it!

The commissioned artists pledge fidelity, more or less, to a set of spartan rules limiting length (no longer than Graham's four minutes), rehearsal time (10 hours tops) and sets (absolutely none allowed). Even given these restrictions, each has managed to re-envision the original in signature ways--for instance, turning the spare, tense, wrenching angularity of Graham's grieving into something eerily luxurious for soloist Katherine Crockett (Richard Move, 2007), bringing the entire company onstage (Larry Keigwin, 2007), turning the solo into an interracial male duet (Kyle Abraham, 2015) or teaching Memphis Jookin to a cluster of nine young Grahamites (Lil Buck, 2017).

"The question became 'How to put new choreography on the stage next to Graham classics," said Eilber as she opened the evening in the company's studio at Westbeth, former home of Merce Cunningham's troupe. "Would I get run out of town?" Ultimately, though, she found that introducing new work helped audiences "appreciate Martha Graham more and remember what a radical she was."

A radical, indeed. Throughout these opening remarks, an early 1940s video of Graham dancing Lamentation played behind and loomed over Eilber, proving her correct. Graham worked that solo. Her concept and vision for it, along with her fierce performance, remain unmatched. Last evening's program featured Variations by Abraham, Keigwin, Gwen Welliver (preparing for a 2018 Tallahassee premiere), Bulareyaung Pagarlava as well as Lil Buck's New York premiere. Each offered elements of interest...and yet...and yet...Graham remains queen.

Lamentation Variations concludes this evening with another informal toast and studio showing at 7pm, featuring Variations by Aszure Barton, Doug Varone, Richard Move, Larry Keigwin and Lil Buck. Click here for information and ticketing.

Martha Graham Studio Theater
Westbeth, 55 Bethune Street (11th Floor), Manhattan
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Kyle Abraham's "Dearest Home" at The Kitchen

Tamisha Guy and Marcella Lewis
in Kyle Abraham's Dearest Home
(photo: Paula Court)

In Dearest Home, choreographer Kyle Abraham (Abraham.In.Motion) has made space for tears (quiet, copious, frequent), hands that shake from illness, incomprehension or desperation, and so many moments of vulnerable physical and emotional intimacy that we do not or rarely see in contemporary dance. Presented in the round at The Kitchen for Lumberyard in the City festival, this extraordinary ensemble piece speaks on so many levels. You can read in it Abraham's personal experiences of love and loss--as well as your own--and you can also trace the longings and sorrows we face as members of the broader human family in a time of crisis.

With this work, Abraham has stepped to a new level of focus and maturity, and his dancers--Matthew Baker, Tamisha Guy, Catherine Ellis Kirk, Marcella Lewis, Jeremy "Jae" Neal and Connie Shiau--are exemplary in their searching, open expressiveness and overall commitment.

If you're lucky to have tickets for this afternoon's matinee--which, sadly, concludes the run--you might do as I was advised to do and forego using headphones to hear the music. The music, composed by Jerome Begin, is an optional ingredient. You do have that choice, and I am now curious about it but still glad that nothing came between me and this heartbreaking, unforgettable work.

For information and tickets, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
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Ailey winds up the year, fresher than ever at City Center

Chalvar Monteiro of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
 in Kyle Abraham's Untitled America
(photo: Rosalie O'Connor)

A scene from Johan Inger's Walking Mad
(photo: Paul Kolnik)

I'd fully expect the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater to look swell in Billy Wilson' The Winter in Lisbon (1992), celebrating the music of Dizzy Gillespie. High-polished ballet-modern moves, inspired by cool and sleek or hot-sauced social dancing, are a big part of the Ailey resumé. And following Walking Mad, Johan Inger's dark, frantic farce which appears to be about relationship anxieties, and Untitled America, Kyle Abraham's meditation on prison life and distressed families, the Wilson piece seems like luscious dessert for City Center audiences waiting to exhale and dancers eager to please.

On Thursday night, this current Ailey troupe addressed all three works with such freshness that even the Wilson romp delivered far more than the customary snap. And let's give the Ailey women their due. They're dancing with extraordinary investment, holding nothing back. You look at the entire ensemble in this program and notice them, this secret weapon inside the troupe, a young cadre you don't want to mess with--women like Danica Paulos and Jacquelin Harris. And on Thursday night in the Abraham and Wilson pieces, their royal Jacqueline Green made romantic lyricism and dignified stateliness look like something the company is showing off for the first time.

Abraham's Untitled America, a world premiere, draws poignancy from a soundscape featuring interview clips of people whose family lives have been disrupted by incarceration (and one searing song in particular, Laura Mvula's "Father Father"). Abraham honors these voices and real lives with accessible iconography--for instance, hands clasped behind as if manacled, or the gentle, solemn approach to hallowed ground where, we easily imagine, a fallen loved one has been laid to rest--inside impressionistic choreographic patterns. His work speaks of ruin but reflects hope. It relies on faith in a universal ability to understand common imagery and human gesture, to recognize woundedness and suffering in the Other as in ourselves, to care because life matters. It offers what we desperately need now, and the Ailey company, with its widespread popularity, is ideally suited to carry this example as far as possible.

The Ailey troupe dances Ronald K. Brown's Cuba-inspired Open Door
to music by Arturo O'Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra
(photo: Paul Kolnik)

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater season runs through December 31 with its usual abundant and diverse programming. For complete schedule information and tickets, click here.

New York City Center
131 W 55th St (between 6th and 7th Avenues), Manhattan
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Kyle Abraham's neighborhood remains in motion

Choreographer Kyle Abraham
dances in Pavement.
(photo: Carrie Schneider)

What does it mean to bring a Black neighborhood into theatrical space? Like the Black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, where dance artist Kyle Abraham grew up, or historically Black sections of Brooklyn where Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion finishes its season at BAM Fisher this evening?

It takes more than lining the space with a chain-linked fence and basketball hoop, evocative though those details certainly are. It takes a sensibility large enough and a skill sharp enough to reflect the complexity of Black life through the power of dance imagery.

What other artists have done so well between the covers of a book or across a movie screen, Abraham strives to do in the hour-long Pavement, first commissioned by Harlem Stage and shown there in the fall of 2012 as the city reeled from Hurricane Sandy. That show went on even as the troupers had to make do without their set, stored away in New Jersey. The fence and hoop (and a projection that features No Loitering signs) appear in the BAM production, establishing, for our benefit, a literal sense of place.

But a neighborhood is more than its coordinates. It lives in its rhythms--its music, its laughter, its glances, its gestures of kinship, its anger and hair-trigger aggression, its desires and its hopes. With his brief, opening solo to gruff blues, Abraham first directs us to look for and read these rhythms in movements that are both hunched and earthy. Nothing's realer than the wide, boisterous roll of his pelvis. But Abraham, as choreographer, can be indirect and elusive, suspending any interpretation-minded viewer in a limbo of ambiguity because there's just so much on his page.

When a white man wraps his arms around a Black man, pulls him to the floor, face down, and gently folds the man's arms behind his back, you read many things at once. The softness of the energy between the men. The unexpected compliance of the brother. The iconic and traumatically internalized image that cannot be severed from too many videos of Black men subdued or slain by cops.

Later in the piece, dancers lower themselves atop one another in the same downward, hands-restrained position--with the same gentleness, willingness, inevitability. You see bodies piling up as Sam Cooke croons a love song--I belong to your heart /You alone can possess me/No one else can caress me /I belong to your heart--and it is simply too much to easily process.

I remember interviewing a wunderkind Abraham in 2008--a year of Hope with a capital H--and asking him some trite question about Obama. Now it is eight years later. How many Black men and women have been incarcerated or murdered by the police since that year of capital H hope? The shades of our dead pass through Pavement and cannot be ignored.

I'm intrigued by the half of the stage that often stays empty while dancers bunch in formation in the other half. I'm intrigued by the breadth of Abraham's embrace--Bach to Donny Hathaway--and the compression of contemporary dance, West African dance, ballet and hip hop, dancers confidently switching codes through these distinct states of being. They both acknowledge and defy the limitations of theater space, representing lived experience, culture and intimacy within its make-believe confines. They make a neighborhood.

With performances by Kyle Abraham, Matthew Baker, Vinson Fraley, Jr., Tamisha Guy, Thomas House, Chalvar Monteiro, Jeremy "Jae" Neal and Kevin Ricardo Tate

Pavement concludes this evening with a performance at 7:30pm. For tickets and information, click here.

BAM Fisher (Fishman Space)
 321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
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How will dancers embody the Afrofuture?

CALL FOR CONFERENCE PROPOSALS: 

DANCING THE AFRICAN DIASPORA: EMBODYING THE AFROFUTURE

Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CADD) Conference
Duke University, February 19-21, 2016

How might we imagine the impact and import of Black dance within the context of afro-futurism?

What sorts of movement practices reflect an embodied Black feminist/womanist perspective?

What does Black Dance contribute within the context of ongoing brutality and practices of resistance?

CADD's second conference, Dancing the African Diaspora: Embodying the Afrofuture, aims to re-ignite the discourse on defining Black Dance on a global scale by bringing together scholars, practitioners, educators, and other stakeholders for three days of intellectual and artistic inspiration.  Anchored by critical dialogue and provocative research presentations, the conference will also feature breakout sessions, movement workshops, film screenings, and a performance by Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion culminating their Duke residency.

This three-day conference seeks to center African diaspora dance as a resource and method of aesthetic identity. The Collegium for African Diaspora Dance aims to facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion that captures the variety of topics, approaches, and methods that might constitute Black Dance Studies.

"Dancing the African Diaspora" suggests multiple exigencies and interests. We are interested in papers/presentations that consider dance practices throughout the African diaspora, and the specific contexts that engender them. We are also interested in dance as an approach to the understanding/engaging the African diaspora itself. This convening situates black dance as constituted by theories of black performance. We invite you to explore black movement as a technology of African diasporic identity-making. Presentations are invited along any theoretical line of inquiry concerned with African diaspora dance. We welcome papers that engage any site or topic related to black movement and those that represent a rigorous engagement with a number of disciplinary and methodological perspectives.

Possible topics include:

Black dance, virtuality, and technologies of mediationPedagogical politicsIdentity and community makingCorporeality, gender and sexuality in the African diaspora danceColonialism, neoliberalism, commodification

Deadline for Proposals:  October 1, 2015

Confirmations sent:  October 15, 2015

Click here to submit your proposal. 

For questions, click here.

 
Conference Committee|Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CADD)Founding Members

Takiyah Amin, Thomas F. DeFrantz,  Shireen Dickson, Jasmine Johnson, Raquel Monroe, C. Kemel Nance, Carl Paris, John Perpener, Will Rawls, Makeda Thomas, Andrea E. Woods Valdés, Ava LaVonne Vinesett

Sponsors for this event include: SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology in residence at Duke; Humanities Writ Large @ Duke; the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance; the Corporeality Working Group @ Duke; the Duke Dance Program; African and African American Studies at Duke.

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)

Robert Glasper on collaborating with choreographer Kyle Abraham

Jazz composer/musician Robert Glasper discusses his latest collaboration with dance artist Kyle Abraham on When the Wolves Came In which will premiere at New York Live Arts on September 25.

For information on When the Wolves Came In, click here.

Abraham will also present The Watershed in a separate program. For information, click here.

Kyle Abraham in a luminous film by Gabri Christa

Dance artist and filmmaker Gabri Christa wrote me this note about 2013 MacArthur Award winner, Kyle Abraham:

When I saw Kyle dance (in 2007), I was immediately smitten--and also because he looks like my family. Yes, I wanted to make a film with my dad, and Kyle looks so much like my dad when he was younger, it was a no-brainer. So we lived together and worked together in my home town, and he is also a wonderful person who deserves all the love he is getting. So here they are: my dad Marcel Stomp and my lil bro Kyle.

From TenduTV's Essential Dance Film collection on YouTube: 

An older man looks at his younger self (Kyle Abraham) explore an old quarantine building for enslaved Africans. Quarantine is the first film in Gabri Christa's Another Building series, which features short narrative dance films that take place in and around historic buildings and sites connected to the Dutch History.

The quarantine building was in Curaçao and housed slaves who were too sick to be taken to the Americas. 

For more information on the Another Building series, click here.

Kyle Abraham, Alexei Ratmansky among MacArthur "Genius" Award winners

Choreographer Kyle Abraham in conversation with Shay Wafer
at CollectiveDWNM Open House, Gibney Dance Center
(c)2012, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

24 Recipients of MacArthur ‘Genius’ Awards Named

by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, September 24, 2013

APAP note: Kyle Abraham at Danspace Project

Last spring, I saw, and marveled at, an early version of Kyle Abraham's ensemble piece Pavement--then called Boyz N The Hood: Pavement--during Danspace Project's historic, brilliant Parallels series. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, I missed Abraham's world premiere of Pavement at Harlem Stage Gatehouse. But that's one thing APAP showcases are good for: catching up with stuff. The piece now looks tighter, clearer and, at the same time, more sophisticated in its intriguing ambiguity about people and interactions. Abraham's dancers--well-chosen and vivacious--are poised for greatness. You can feel it.

Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion

Coming to the Guggenheim in 2013

Daniel Beaty and Moisés Kaufman
Tallest Tree in the Forest
Sunday, January 13, 7:30pm; Monday, January 14, 3 and 7:30pm

Advance tickets are available for the Works & Process presentation of The Tallest Tree in the Forest. The play, by Obie-Award winning performer and writer Daniel Beaty and Tony- and Emmy-nominated director and playwright Moisés Kaufman, explores the evolution of Paul Robeson as an actor and activist.

Wendy Whelan
Restless Creature
Sunday and Monday, Apr 14 and 15, 7:30pm

Hailed by the New York Times as “America’s greatest contemporary ballerina,” Wendy Whelan performs a Shen Wei solo; a duet with New York City Ballet’s Robbie Fairchild choreographed by Joshua Beamish; and excerpts from Restless Creature, featuring four new duets by Beamish, Kyle Abraham, Brian Brooks, and Alejandro Cerrudo, prior to its premiere at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Jacob’s Pillow Executive and Artistic Director Ella Baff moderates a discussion with Whelan and the four choreographers.

For a schedule of the entire Works & Process series, click here.

Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue ( at 89th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

On an Ailey high

Rachel McLaren (photo by Andrew Eccles)

Last night, Rachel McLaren (seen above in a publicity shot for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater) nailed The Evolution of A Secured Feminine--Camille A. Brown's virtuosic character solo. Brown is inimitable, but McLaren now has added her own brand of sass to the swift-moving piece, set to songs by Ella Fitzgerald, Betty Carter and Nancy Wilson. She made me stop and think how tricky it is for one dancer to try to hold the big City Center stage whose audience expects to see the Ailey corps fan out and fill it with energy and charm. McLaren, with her fashion model looks and razor-sharp style, gets the solo's attitude and variable timing down. She knows when to click into place, when to ease the moment, and never makes the movements look mechanical--which can happen if you are just rushing them without animating them. She luxuriates in Evolution, and so we do, too. The audience loved her. I hope you get to see her this Ailey season.

The zooming Kyle Abraham now joins the Ailey pantheon with his upbeat ensemble, Another Night, and shows he can work into that time-honored big stage-filling tradition. Set to Art Blakey's heady play on Dizzy Gillespie's "A Night in Tunisia," this piece opens with slinky lead dancer Jacqueline Green unfurling long limbs into smoky environs and proceeds to explode with kicking, twirling, windmilling Ailey dynamos. Abraham's choreography doesn't seem to resonate from inside these bodies yet--with the fleeting exception of Renaldo Gardner's fun turn in the spotlight. Some similar flashes of interest go by in just that--lightning flashes. Zip, zip, gone. (Hey, can we see more of that? No? Oh, well...) Hope Boykin nicely stirs an already bubbling pot and gives us glimpses of a real person--not just a dancer stand-in for a person--without distracting from the overall action. Another Night is not the killer piece Abraham could give the Ailey troupe. Bring it, Kyle.

Jacqueline Green leads the cast of Kyle Abraham's Another Night (photo by Paul Kolnik)

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater continues its New York City Center season through December 30. For information on remaining performances and the company's upcoming US tour, click here.

New York City Center
55th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Kyle Abraham awarded residency by New York Live Arts

Kyle Abraham Gets New New York Live Arts Residency
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, November 7, 2012

Photos from CollectiveDWNM's Open House at Gibney

Two CollectiveDWNM interns--Dale Amanda O'Reilly and Hayley Muth--from our Leadership Circle. Photo (c)2012, Donna Mason

What a pleasure to welcome lots of new and old friends to the Open House for Collective for Dance Writing and New Media at the Gibney Dance Center last evening! We thank everyone who came, especially our new and prospective members. Big thanks, also, to our great interns and volunteers on the scene, to our fantastic guests--Shay Wafer, Executive Director of 651 Arts, and dance artists Marjani Forté and Kyle Abraham--and to the ever-generous Gina Gibney and her staff.

Enjoy this gallery of photos from the event and, if you didn't make it last night, don't worry: We're working on more get-togethers for sharing--artists-to-writers, artists-to-audience, and dance world-to-outside world. We'll announce exciting news in the coming weeks. Be sure to join us next time!

Kyle Abraham with dance artist Walter Rutledge. Photo (c)2012, Donna Mason

Marjani Forté. Photo (c)2012, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

New York Live Arts' Ben Kimitch greets Shay Wafer. Photo (c)2012, Donna Mason

Shay Wafer in conversation with Kyle Abraham. Photo (c)2012, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Special guests announced for first CollectiveDWNM Open House

Kyle Abraham (photo by Steven Schreiber)

Marjani Forté  (photo by Ian Douglas)

Yes. You got that right: 

Kyle Abraham

Marjani Forté

in conversation with 651 Arts' Shay Wafer

Shay Wafer (photo by Whitney Thomas)

Collective for Dance Writing and New Media's

Executive Committee

and

Leadership Circle

welcome you to our first  

Open House

 Monday, September 10 (6-8pm)

presented by in partnership with 651 Arts

hosted by Gibney Dance Center 

890 Broadway, 5th Floor, (19th/20th Streets), Manhattan

(directions)

Curious about CollectiveDWNM? Want to join as a member or participate in our Leadership Circle (internship program)?

This Open House will be a great time to become involved with this important new initiative, open to writers and all media professionals, artists, students, advocates and fans who care passionately about the art of dance and its documentation.

Program

6pm: Refreshments. Membership/internship info/sign-up (Studio 3) 

6:40pm: Conversation with Abraham, Forté and Wafer (Studio 6)

Free admission
Annual membership: $20 (cash only)

RSVP now:  
collectivedwnm@gmail.com

ABOUT OUR SPECIAL GUESTS

Kyle Abraham, professional dancer and choreographer, began his training at the Civic Light Opera Academy and the Creative and Performing Arts High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He continued his dance studies in New York, receiving a BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Over the past few years, Abraham has received tremendous accolades and awards for his dancing and choreography including a 2010 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performance in Dance for his work in The Radio Show, a 2010 Princess Grace Award for Choreography, a BUILD grant and an individual artist fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, and selected in 2009 as one of Dance Magazine’s 25 To Watch.

In 2011, OUT Magazine labeled Abraham as the “best and brightest creative talent to emerge in New York City in the age of Obama” and was most recently awarded The Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award in 2012. 

His choreography has been presented throughout the United States and abroad, most recently at On The Boards, South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center, REDCAT, Philly Live Arts, Portland’s Time Based Arts Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, Bates Dance Festival, Harlem Stage, Fall for Dance Festival at New York's City Center, Montreal, Germany, Jordan, Ecuador, Dublin’s Project Arts Center, The Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum located in Okinawa Japan, The Andy Warhol Museum and The Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in his hometown of Pittsburgh, PA.

As a performer, Abraham has worked with acclaimed modern dance companies including David Dorfman Dance, Burnt Sugar Dance Conduction Continuum, Nathan Trice/Rituals, Mimi Garrard Dance Theater, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Dance Alloy, The Kevin Wynn Collection and Attack Theatre. In addition to performing and developing new works for his company, Abraham.In.Motion, Abraham also teaches his unique approach to post-modern dance in various schools and studios throughout the United States.

He is currently working on a new pas de deux for himself and acclaimed Bessie Award winning dancer and New York City Principal, Wendy Whelan while still creating new works for his company A/I/M.

For more information please visit: http://abrahaminmotion.org

Marjani Forté is a Los Angeles, CA native and Harlem resident. She graduated with a B.A. in Marketing and Dance from Loyola Marymount University and attended Los Angeles High School for the Arts.  She was a five-year member of Urban Bush Women Dance Compay and has worked with Earl Moseley, Garth Fagan, Blondell Cummings and Nia Love's BSD|dance. She is now co-founder of LOVE|FORT… A COLLECTIVE--a research/process, performance, and teaching geared collective with a commitment to social and politically conscious art making, that connects the human experience through time (www.loveforte.org). Forté has taught master classes and workshops across the US and beyond including University of Minnesota and TU Dance Center, Florida State University, Hunter CUNY, and the American Dance Festival.  She has presented for New Orleans McKenna Museum, DNA Raw Material, Kelly Strayhorn newMoves Festival in Pittsburg, PA, and DanceNow at Joe's Pub. Forté premiered her solo EGO at Dance Theatre Workshop as a 2010 Fresh Tracks Resident Artist while concluding a choreographic residency and lecture series at Loyola Marymount University. Forté most recently premiered Here… for Danspace PLATFORMS: Parallels Series in March 2012 and EGO for Harlem Stage’s E-Moves April 2012. Forté is a Movement Research Artist-In-Residence 2011-13, a recent BAX Artist in Residence with LOVE|FORT…, and has joined a roster of teaching professionals, as faculty, at Dance New Amsterdam in NYC.  Forté is thrilled to join arms with 651 Arts in the further creative development of Here… Her work stems from being born in and having engaged with culturally rich, vibrant, historic, and politically charged communities. 

Shay Wafer, Executive Director of 651 ARTS, has demonstrated a stalwart dedication to the arts and community development through many years of service to the field. Her passionate vision is balanced with pragmatic experience, as she has held senior level positions at a number of non-profit arts organizations with a focus on African-American programming, community engagement and arts education. In 2007, Shay became the founding Vice President of Programs for the August Wilson Center for African American Culture, a new multi-disciplinary performing arts center and museum in downtown Pittsburgh. Prior to the August Wilson Center, she served for six years as the managing director of Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles, California--her hometown. She also served as the Managing Director of the St. Louis Black Repertory Company and LA Theatreworks. She was a founding partner of Marla Gibb’s Crossroads Arts Academy and Theatre in L.A., as well as the co-founder of Colored Girl Productions. Ms. Wafer has engaged in additional community and volunteer activities throughout her career including serving on the Board of Directors of Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and as a NEFA National Theatre Project Advisor. A graduate of Howard University and Yale School of Drama, prior to working in the arts field she was a pre-school and kindergarten teacher.

A new year starts with APAP

Top, L-R: Bergen Wheeler, Douglas Gillespie, Leslie Kraus and Luke Murphy
in Kate Weare's Garden
Below, front: Leslie Kraus with Bergen Wheeler in Garden
Photos ©Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang

My illustrious guest for The Joyce Theater's second evening of Focus Dance, faced with no project to showcase for APAP this season, was jazzed about being able to run around seeing lots of stuff, just like the rest of us. "It's like New Year's Eve all over again!" she said--only one of many encouraging things she said--uttering what might be my motto for this APAP season and more. Every encounter, greeted with openness and genuine interest: Perhaps that could be a worthy New Year's resolution in dance and beyond dance.

If so, my first APAP event, Focus Dance--one of the latest in a cluster of APAP-related dance festivals--certainly snapped into focus with presentations by Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion and Kate Weare Company on their shared program on Wednesdav evening.

Weare's Garden is a keen, satisfying journey into what could be an alternate universe's sexually-fluid, seductive and treacherous Eden crafted by an alternate, wilder-minded Martha Graham. Weare's dancers, as always, are all gems but, as always, it's impossible to take your eyes off the two women--Leslie Kraus and Bergen Wheeler--whose performances are larger than life.

Scene from Kyle Abraham's Live!: The Realest MC
Photos ©Steven Schreiber

Abraham's company opens the Focus Dance evening with excerpts from Live!: The Realest MC, a dazzling, emotionally affecting ensemble on the complications of Black masculinity. It is this young choreographer's best effort to date. From the glittery costumes by Abraham and Kristi Wood to the rich, gorgeous lighting design by Dan Scully, this production holds together in a seamless system and  shows evidence of a bright artist who knows who he is and has something worth saying. His movement scheme draws ideas from popular culture without settling for the easy, familiar image. He always wants to find out what else he can do with it, what's underneath it, how it might look on a different body. And he has not stopped exploring new ways to cut and shape space. A wizard of a dancer in his own right, Abraham is joined here by a snazzy, diverse group of performers--Rena Butler, Chalvar Monteiro, Elyse Morris, Rachelle Rafailedes, Hsiao-Jou Tang and Maleek Malaki Washington--who I hope will stay and continue to grow right along with him.

If tickets are still available, don't miss the second and last Kyle Abraham/Kate Weare evening, this Sunday at 7:30pm. For information, click here.

The Joyce Theater

Eighth Avenue between 18th and 19th Streets, Manhattan

(directions)

Members of chelfitsch Theater Company
in Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech

Photos ©Julie Lemberger 2012

Below: Mari Ando and Taichi Yamagata

chelfitsch Theater Company's return to Japan Society--as part of The Public Theater's notable APAP fest, Under The Radar is cause for celebration. And that's true even though Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech (2009)--a trio of nutty little workplace scenarios written and directed by Toshiki Okada--takes off from a boring, antiseptic environment that is anything but celebratory. I love the way these guys just smack woozy sound and banal, obsessive text up against fidgety, painfully askew movement in a depiction of a way of life that is seriously out of whack. Even so, their characters often have a charm that relieves the cartoonish abstraction. Trust me, it's all fun, and all expertly done--particularly the movement and particularly when Mari Ando and Taichi Yamagata do the Air Conditioner duet (photo above). Do not miss!

Seats are limited. Hurry to see chelfitsch at Japan Society now through January 14. For information, click here.

Japan Society
333 East 47th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

See my favorite things of 2011. Click here!

Barnard Dances at Miller

Barnard College Department of Dance, under chair and artistic director Mary Cochran, has commissioned new works by renowned choreographers Kyle Abraham, Faye Driscoll, Jill Johnson and Jon Kinzel for its student performers. 

Barnard Dances at Miller
Friday, April 29, 7pm
Saturday, April 30, 2pm and 7pm

For more information, click here.

Tickets: $20; $12 with Columbia University ID
To purchase, call 212-854-7799

Miller Theater
2960 Broadway (at 116th Street), Manhattan
(map)