Dance to the Radio

During a week that sees
several of the dance world’s most established and veteran figures open their
New York seasons, one of the most intriguing newer artists on the scene is
offering his first full evening of work in the City. Kyle Abraham has made a
riveting impression with his sinuous-yet-funky, elegantly articulated dancing
whenever he has turned up. But with Radio
Show, he is taking a major step, offering a work for seven dancers (himself
included) filled with juicy, varied movement and propelled by thoughtful,
evocative inquiry.

A Pittsburgh native,
Abraham is referencing his hometown in this piece, specifically, its popular
radio station WAMO that was taken off the air last September. He grew up
listening to the station’s mix of soul and R&B, always turned it whenever
he arrived back for a visit and still speaks of it in the present tense, like a
relative whose loss has not yet fully registered. “It is the only urban voice
on the radio there,” he said at St. Mark’s Church after his company,
Abraham.In.Motion, had run through the piece, which is in two halves, “AM” and
“FM.”

“When WAMO went off the
air, I started thinking about what radio is to a community, especially an urban
community, where a lot of people aren’t going to counseling. People calling in,
voicing their opinion in a way that, to me, is a connection to therapy or
counseling. To not have that, what does that do to a community?”

Also feeding into the ideas
he is exploring was a more personal experience: watching his father cope with
Alzheimer’s disease and lose his ability to communicate through speech. “The
parallel for me is the loss of the voice. There’s the loss of a voice in an
urban community, and now my father’s inability to say how he feels about a
certain situation. I am looking at these things I layers. I wanted to keep I
mind that I did not want to make a downer piece, because it’s a heavy subject.”
The mix of classic soul and hip-hop tracks he has assembled (with a score by
Alva Noto woven in) certainly should mitigate against that worry.

Abraham studied the cello
before discovering dance during high school, getting hooked enough to go for
his BFA at SUNY Purchase and his MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. But
while his dancing has long attracted notice and high praise, he was always
focused on making dances as well as performing. “The only reason I chose to go
to college for dance, and to go to a performing arts school, was to have more
tools to make dance,” he said. He currently performs with David Dorfman Dance,
and did a brief stint with Bill T. Jones after college. He mentions having
stopped dancing for a year and a half after that, but stops short of saying
there was a connection.

But he’s certainly dancing
now. As he went through his opening solo, one could sense occasional allusions
to street dancing—in its suppleness and spontaneity—but also the intelligence
and control with which he performs. As his dancers joined in, often for solos
or (sometimes overlapping) duets, there were introspective and disturbing
moments—the discomfiture of a body once so in control, losing some of that and
finding itself at the mercy of what Abraham called “disconnected synapses”
Abraham mentioned when talking about his father.

It’s a subject that takes
certainly him into emotional territory, but then he brightens when he mentions
a change in his father, whom he doesn’t recall having danced much before. “Any
time a song comes on, he gets up and will not stop dancing. It’s amazing. We’re
at the home sometime, and they have a DJ, and he wont sit down!

“Then thinking about that,
from a dance perspective, that muscle memory—what is the connection between
that and getting into a more visceral place?”

Joining his appetite for
invigorating, captivating movement with a search for uneasy answers to
uncomfortable questions, Abraham is certainly operating on all frequencies in
what promises to be a most intriguing new work.

>Radio Show

Feb. 25-27, Danspace
Project at St. Mark’s Church, 131 E. 10th St. (at 2nd Ave.), 866-811-4111; 8, $12 and up.