In rehearsals, the choreographer Kyle Abraham is usually at the front of the room, directing and shaping his work. But on a recent afternoon at the Park Avenue Armory, he came running into the studio with childlike abandon — the opening of his latest dance.
As he circled the space, his hopeful run slowed to a plodding jog; then he regained momentum, adding in stutters, little leaps, quick shifts of direction. Finally, his pace slackened again, and he exited with a stooped, weary walk, as more dancers breezed in. In just a few minutes, he had danced the span of a life.
It’s been nine years since Abraham, 47, last made an ensemble work in which he also performed. Throughout his career, he has struggled with stage fright, he said, especially when dancing in groups. (He is more at ease in solos.) But for “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,” a new large-scale, evening-length production that deals with themes of aging, change and vulnerability, he knew he needed to be present onstage.
“It would have felt like a cop-out not to put myself in it,” he said in an interview at the Armory, where the work will have its premiere on Dec. 3. “If I’m scared of failure, ugliness, change, not having the facility I had 20 years ago, all of that should be in the work.”
In the dances he has made for his company, A.I.M. over the last 15 years, Abraham has often been inspired by sources with a personal resonance, reflective of his experiences as a queer Black man from Pittsburgh. In “The Radio Show” (2010), he traced a thread between the closure of a beloved hometown radio station and his father’s struggle with aphasia. In “An Untitled Love” (2022), he paid homage to the neo-soul music of D’Angelo and the social gatherings of his childhood.
But “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful” arises from an even more personal and immediate place: his anxieties and insecurities — about himself and his future, about the state of the world, fears that have intensified over time, he said. “I’m saddened by delayed positive progressive change in this world, and frightened by the chaos of pandemic debris.” He noted how his body and mind were growing more fragile with age, and how he saw in himself a resemblance to his father, who developed dementia in his early 50s.
“This is the first time I’m trying to make a dance that is really rooted in how I feel at this moment — it’s very present-day,” Abraham said in June, after an intensive stretch of rehearsals at the Armory. “I talk to the dancers about my fears of making a work that’s so connected to how I’m feeling, because to stay in that vulnerable place is really exhausting.” He sees the title as an expansive prayer: to make himself a better person, to make the world less cruel.
Immersed in the intimacy of the process, Abraham has also been navigating the not-so-intimate scale of the Armory and its breathtakingly vast (55,000 square feet) drill hall. “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful” will feature a custom-built stage with an audience capacity of nearly 800, visual design by the new media artist Cao Yuxi (also known as JAMES) and an original score by the chamber ensemble yMusic, played live. Abraham has assembled a cast of 17 dancers, with several guests joining the core company.
Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director, first approached Abraham about making a work for the space in 2018. (The pandemic caused delays.) “The room is not a room you can give to somebody inexperienced,” Audi said in a phone interview, adding that the challenge is to find artists who aren’t afraid of the scale, who “can do something with it.”
“It’s very big,” he said, “but you can achieve concentration in there, you can focus. I think the people who handle it, they immediately find focuses, so that the center of gravity of the performance is established, and from that point, it also develops.”
As Abraham began envisioning a project of this scope, he was drawn to the image of a singular figure amid the vastness, how the size of the room could accentuate isolation. (“I’m a true Debbie Downer at heart,” he joked.) His opening solo is just one of many moments that find a dancer or two alone on the stage, or starkly set apart from a group.
But just as integral are passages for the full ensemble, which sweeps through the space like weather or a wave. In developing the movement, a collaborative process with the cast, Abraham was thinking about transition on an individual, human scale and more broadly, in nature. (An outside point of reference was the Richard Powers novel “The Overstory,” about human-forest relations.)
The dancer Stephanie Terasaki, 30, recalled an exercise in which the dancers explored simply walking as if they were different ages — 8 or 35 or 75. The idea was to practice “imagining ourselves in that body,” Terasaki said, and then to access those qualities in the choreography.
Giving notes in a rehearsal over the summer, Abraham encouraged the dancers to move “as if draped in Talbots attire.” To Terasaki, that was his way of saying comfortable, or lived-in, “like the clothes that you’ve owned for years, the way they hug you.” Another prompt he likes, for releasing inhibitions: “Dance like you have no student loans!”
“I say that all the time, but I mean it,” he said, laughing. “What does it mean to dance with this kind of freedom, that you actually feel like you can do anything?” As somber as “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful” can be, Abraham also tried to tap into something carefree, a sense of innocence or utopia, the way a person might feel before life’s heavier burdens set in.
Inspired by these opposing moods and ideas about time’s passage, the six musicians of yMusic tried to let the score hover between emotional registers. They were interested in staying flexible, in creating something that could morph, if needed, once they got into the studio with the dancers. And as first time composers for dance, they allowed themselves to be surprised.
“I think it’s amazing whenever the choice is to dance in silence,” said Nadia Sirota, the group’s violist. “Because being a musician, I’m like, ‘Let’s decorate this!’ It’s very cool when Kyle is like: ‘No, no, no. This is a really active thing in silence.’”
“Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful” closes out a characteristically busy year for Abraham, a MacArthur award winner with a steady stream of commissions outside his company. This fall he unveiled a new work for American Ballet Theater, remounted a piece at the Royal Ballet and presented an A.I.M. premiere at Peak Performances. In the spring at Danspace Project, he organized “A Delicate Ritual,” a series of performances and conversations engaging with the themes of “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,” but featuring artists other than himself.
Seta Morton, a Danspace curator who collaborated with him on “A Delicate Ritual,” said: “Kyle is one of the busiest artists I’ve ever worked with, but he is so present and detail oriented. He was really involved at every step.”
She also noted his decision not to perform or present his dances in the series (though the invitation was there). “He was very specific and conscious about when he would step in and when he would be in the wings,” she said. “That felt super clear. I imagine there’s a certain vulnerability to stepping back into his own work.”
Abraham can be hypercritical of his presence onstage, dissecting his technique, comparing himself to younger dancers. A relative latecomer to formal training, he started out dancing at raves in Pittsburgh and took his first dance class the summer before his senior year of high school. Even early in his career, as a member of the contemporary company David Dorfman Dance, he grappled with feeling self-conscious in performance. “I only felt good if I could lose myself,” he said.
In “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,” where he might see himself as not beautiful enough, others see something different.
“Yes, he is so critical, in the way I think we all are, in terms of how we perceive our own dancing,” Terasaki said. “But I find that what’s really most important is the way he’s carrying the energy within his body and how that flows, or sometimes doesn’t flow or gets interrupted. It’s seeing that, versus any technical element.”
In choreographing his role, Abraham had in mind the image of a shield: how people become guarded over time, protective of themselves and those they love. But that state doesn’t have to be static.
“I’m also trying to make space to play in the prayer — like, How angry can I be? How ugly?” he said. “And then how can I try to have a moment to feel beautiful and free and calm.”
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