Ellen Crane Photography
Even before the first strains of Kendrick Lamar’s galvanizing “Alright” fell over the stage, company dancers from Abraham.In.Motion were taking a stand, and then some, on the evolving politics of black identity.
Behind them, footage of protests rolled across a linen scrim, priming the audience for what was to come. The video died down as the music ramped up. The dancers’ bodies jerked violently, choppily, as they made their way across the stage. Arms soared upward, long fingers catching in the light. Faces turned toward the audience, then back toward the stage, launching into untethered motion as the number of dancers grew.
Watch my breath and my body carefully, six dancers seemed to say to audience members. Because neither of them will be a given by the end of this number.
The gorgeous and emotional brainchild of Kyle Abraham, Abraham.In.Motion blessed New Haven’s packed University Theater Tuesday and Wednesday nights as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
In 90-minute performances, the company offered a new and challenging take on topics including apartheid, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, and the gender divide, backed by live music, remixes, and multimedia effects. As a four-movement set — not quite a narrative, but not not one either — the program doubled as a meditation on what it means to move through and unpack collective memory, to lend lyricism to lived experience.
Works like “Absent Matter” and “The Gettin’” put these front and center, trusting company members to paint struggle and attempted resolution with their bodies alone. Choreographer Abraham is, by his own admission, steeped in hip-hop culture, and it shows in the way he has constructed these numbers, where dancers transform into instruments of change, bolstered by virtuosic musicians Kris Bowers (keys), Otis Brown III (drums), Chris Smith (bass) and Charenee Wade (vocals).
It’s new, refreshing, and not gimmicky. In “Absent Matter,” bars of Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar lend to movements a decided timeliness and urgency. In “The Gettin,” jazz pushes dancers into the shallow and sharp recesses of recent memory. So does an extraordinary set by artist Glenn Ligon, which becomes as much a character in the work as the dancers themselves.
These make revelatory Abraham’s mission to “delve into identity” without ever quite spoon-feeding the viewer. He does veer dangerously close to that once — when Lamar’s gritty, word-wielding ballad, now an unofficial anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement, proves too much for the end of “Absent Matter,” and overwhelms the piece — but even then he remains on the edge of something spectacular, redeeming himself wholly in “The Gettin’.”
More exciting, perhaps, are the reflective forays into identity that come at the beginning of the set, and echo throughout it. In the aptly titled “The Quiet Dance,” dancers move fluidly until they simply don’t, leaving it to audience members to figure out what worldly weight has crashed in on them. Every synchronized motion speaks volumes, and so does every break from them.
There is change brewing here, literally underfoot. You have to see the whole thing to fully believe it’s possible — or perhaps, to will a new era of reflection into being.
Tickets are still available for a final performance Thursday night, 8 p.m., at the University Theater, 222 York St. Click here for more information.
