The Choreographer Kyle Abraham Mixes Things Up at City Ballet
Professor Kyle Abraham is a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, a 2015 City Center Choreographer in residence, and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. His dance company, A.I.M. (Abraham in Motion) has performed across the country and internationally.
"It’s not every day that New York City Ballet dancers rehearse to Aaliyah, Jay-Z and Kanye West. But on a recent evening, these voices set the mood in a Lincoln Center studio as the choreographer Kyle Abraham stitched together steps for a new ballet.
Mr. Abraham rehearsing his new piece. “I’m not trying to make ‘Save the Last Dance’ at City Ballet,” he said. “Like that canned version of ballet with an urban zhoozh. I’m fighting to not be doing that.”
Credit Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times“You can calm it down a bit,” he said to the dancer Sebastian Villarini-Velez, who was practicing a shoulder-brushing move. “Take your punctuation out. Let it be a flirt.”
Calm down, let go, do less: For the eight dancers in Mr. Abraham’s new work, which will have its premiere at City Ballet’s Fall Fashion Gala on Sept. 27, feedback along these lines is only to be expected. In developing the piece, his first for a ballet company, Mr. Abraham has been introducing his cast to a more released way of moving than ballet typically calls for. Known for his work with his own New York contemporary dance troupe, A.I.M., he is something of a ballet outsider — and if the energy in rehearsal was any indication, the change of pace was welcome.
Yet Mr. Abraham’s presence at City Ballet also represents something larger: He is the first black artist in more than a decade to create a new work for the company, and just the seventh in its 70-year history. (In a repertory with more than 400 ballets, just 10 are credited or co-credited to black choreographers.)
Those numbers, while troubling, aren’t so surprising. Despite glimmers of progress in the age of Misty Copeland — the American Ballet Theater star who drew national attention to her field’s lack of diversity — the ballet world remains predominantly white, both onstage and behind the scenes. Before his rehearsal, stretching out after a morning ballet class, Mr. Abraham, 41, spoke about the pressures of his position.
“It is a fear for real that if this dance fails, will they never hire a black choreographer again?” he said. “Or will it be another 20-some years? That does concern me a bit.”— Siobhan Burke, Sep. 21, 2018
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the New York Times website.
Read more about Kyle Abraham here.
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