Kyle Abraham’s “Dearest Home” Expresses Growth Amidst Pain
DEAREST HOME is an interactive dance work developed in a multi-year process by World Arts Cultures/Dance professor Kyle Abraham, focused on Loving and Longing, Love and Loss. Comprised primarily of solos and duets generated in conversation and collaboration with a variety of age groups and self-identified subcultures, DEAREST HOME interweaves movement, in its most vulnerable or intimate state, with cross-cultural conversation and community action. This work will be presented at the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA in April.
"In Kyle Abraham’s “Dearest Home,” audience members encircle the stage while dancers move under the waxing and waning lights above. The room itself is noiseless, with only the soft thuds of the dancers’ leaps and turns audible to spectators. Viewers dare not shift in their seats, at the risk of violating the sanctity of the silence. From four sides of the stage, they stare transfixed into the universe that is constructed before them—one that brims with pain and honesty, and very much mirrors their own.
This weekend marked “Dearest Home’s” Connecticut debut. Exhibited at the Wesleyan Center for the Arts Theater in three separate performances, the show displayed 65 minutes of Abraham’s choreography, which was originally staged as a 90-minute show at The Kitchen in New York City. Though Abraham choreographed the piece to silence, audience members had the option to listen with provided headsets to a recorded classical score by Jerome Begin, which allowed them to be privy to a sonic experience that the dancers didn’t have access to.
The result was a sense of remoteness that formed between performer and viewer. Whether standing in complete stillness or moving across the stage in large, ravenous strides, the dancers retained their gazes above their lines of sight—or at one another. Rarely, if ever, did they lock eyes with audience members, even though the first row of spectators sat in chairs on the performance stage. This lack of interaction contributed to the construction of an alternate realm in which only the dancers existed, an experience only aided by music that didn’t seem to really exist. Put on the headset and feel you can enter their world. Take them off and wonder if the sounds were ever real.
The artists featured in “Dearest Home” comprise Abraham’s company, Abraham.In.Motion, which includes dancers who hail from diverse personal backgrounds and who are trained in various disciplines. On stage, they interact with profound intimacy, emphasized by extended embraces, but as sweet as these moments are in transience, they also possess the capacity to grow sour in an instant, exemplified by jerky, more incisive strokes. These changes in quality of movement demonstrate how pain and rejection figure heavily in warmth and affection. Often, more labored and frantic movements follow richer, more supple ones, and we are reminded of how comfort and pain ebb and flow to dance around each other."— Viviane Eng, Oct. 9, 2017
Read the full article at the Wesleyan Argus website.