Inventing Kyle Abraham

While considering graduate schools in choreography, I visited the Dance Department at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Such tours are scripted affairs where potential students are guided along predetermined tracks, like Disney World, only in the long run more expensive. Current students are positioned at regular intervals and encouraged by faculty to emphasize their positive experiences. Meanwhile, the hopeful enrollees navigate a Potemkin department lubricated by frictionless assurances that a bogglingly costly terminal degree in an art form that arguably peaked in the mid-1900s is a good life choice. During my Tisch tour I lost my group in favor of popping into the student lounge, where I asked the occupying students if going to Tisch was worth it. My question was met by a 20-something year old Kyle Abraham, then completing his graduate studies. He told me with the respect, kindness, and candor that I have come to love in the man, that my going to NYU was almost certainly an irredeemably terrible idea.

I remember this exchange for what it reveals about Abraham’s unwillingness to tell dopey falsehoods. He, in that moment, chose to communicate a difficult choreographic truth that I wasn’t ready to hear. (Long story short, my MFA is from NYU.) Considering the episode in the context of Abraham’s long career, it seems the man has become extremely successful for his unwillingness to bend to the comfort of the easy answer. His oeuvre is populated with uncomfortable truths, messages his audience may or may not be willing or able to absorb. As Abraham left NYU I was working as a Producer for DanceNOW[NYC], and in 2006 we presented a solo of his titled Inventing Pookie Jenkins. The piece was a breakout moment for Abraham, who went on to perform the work at Jacob’s Pillow in 2010. The dance is dense, weighty with pastiched complexity, and serves as a prescient gesture of the kinetic contradictions Abraham has explored throughout his accoladed life in dance.

The excerpt begins with Abraham in a warm, downcast spotlight, shirtless, his undulating torso accentuated by a bright white, floor-length, tulle skirt. A simple costume element evocative of a stereotypical balletic tutu, the item’s apparent feminine signifying is in forceful contrast to Abraham’s masculine embodiment. There’s a color scheme at work as well: Abraham is a Black man with dark, plentiful tattoos, and the white blankness of the tutu forms a chiaroscuro contrast across a spectrum of masculine and feminine tropes, as well as a racially marked body partially concealed by a prototypically, historically, and literally white skirt.

The contrasts continue at the level of the movement vocabulary. The first moments of the solo excerpt encompass a heterodox amalgam of classical, postmodern, and club dance movements. At the start, Abraham waves one hand, then two, accompanied by the basso and opening plinks of Dizzee Rascal’s rap track, “Respect Me.” His hands then scrape curvilinear arcs above his head and in front of his torso, a kinespheric exploration reminiscent of William Forsythe’s improvisations on a theme of Laban. The sequence is repeated with permutations and quickening tempo, momentarily situating the gestures in the universe of the club, until with preternatural suddenness Abraham’s body is sucked down to the floor with hands braided gently over a foot and bended knee, a motif seemingly referring to ballet choreographer Michel Fokine’s infamous paean to the tragic feminine and romantic queerness, The Dying Swan.

After premiering Pookie, Abraham’s career took off, and he has since won most of the awards for choreographic excellence that exist. A bit over a decade later, it was announced that Abraham was to be the first African American choreographer in over a decade to create a new work on the New York City Ballet (NYCB). NYCB’s interim management (interim, because they had just removed their longtime director, Peter Martins) had selected Abraham, and the stakes of the selection were neither subtle nor lost on him. In an interview with The New Yorker, Abraham noted that, “I think some people will come to this with the expectation that I’m going to make a hip-hop dance, because I’m a black choreographer.” Similarly, in an interview with The New York Times, he states categorically that he’s not there to contribute “urban zhoozh.” Abraham seemed clearly in a position—not unfamiliar to successful folks of color—where by dint of working in an industry typically reserved for white folks, the success or failure of his labors would not only comment on his individual qualities but also, apparently, act as a litmus test for all the artists of color that NYCB had failed to equitably engage over the years.