Kyle Abraham: Pavement review – dancing in handcuffs with aggression and grace
Set in Pittsburgh’s historically black neighborhoods, Homewood and the Hill District, World Arts and Cultures/Dance professor Kyle Abraham's work, Pavement, aims to create a strong emotional chronology of a culture conflicted with a history plagued by discrimination. Originally choreographed in 2011, Pavement was performed in London over the weekend.
"The basketball court that forms the set of Pavement is like those that can be found in any city in the world, and it’s this universal quality that makes Kyle Abraham’s work so affecting as political dance theatre. He draws on very specific sources – his childhood in Pittsburgh, the LA gang drama Boyz N the Hood – yet this portrait of angry, wired, funny and hopeful young people has a resonance that goes far wider. Set to a musical collage that ranges from Bach to Sam Cook, taking movement from ballet, street and contemporary dance, Pavement transcends its origins to become a picture of the modern world.
It’s Abraham who opens the work, dancing solo to some vintage blues, and as the sassy homeboy angles of his body language yield to a more softly fluid inwardness, we get our first glimpse of how richly yet concisely evocative his choreography can be. Pavement is essentially a series of vignettes in which Abraham and his six dancers represent a marginalised community of young lives – male and female, black and white. The violence that surrounds them daily is brutally delivered by a soundtrack of sirens and gun battles, exchanges between racist cops, gang members and precociously tough little boys. But the violence is no less vivid in the choreography, both in its signature image of hands being cuffed behind backs and in the brawling jittery aggression that continually threatens the formal surface of the movement."— Judith Mackrell, Nov. 20, 2017
Read the full article at the The Guardian website.
Read more about Kyle Abraham's recent works.