One Foot Forward

Among Kyle Abraham’s first performances was as a tween at church camp, where he directed fellow campers in a composition set to Bell Biv DeVoe’s hit 1990 single “Poison.” It was “not really suitable for church,” he says, chuckling at the memory. It wasn’t the first time dancing put him in institutional hot water: Some years earlier, in 1983, Abraham didn’t make it past his first day of first grade at a Pittsburgh Catholic school after he was caught shimmying in his penny loafers. “They told my parents that they didn’t think it was the right school for me.”

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Abraham, who is compact and muscular with tattooed arms and a calm, easygoing smile, has spent his adult life blazing a trail in the world of contemporary dance according to his own vision as a choreographer following what he evocatively describes as “postmodern gumbo.” A maze of legs and arms and feelings with a hard-to-pin-down sort of expressionism: palpable yet intangible, vividly recognizable on an emotional level. Much of what the 47-year-old has brought to fruition he’s accomplished through his namesake dance company, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, which he launched in 2006 following grad school at New York University. As an individual, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013 and has collaborated with companies across the globe, including the New York City Ballet, the Royal Ballet, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater—not to mention with stars like Misty Copeland and Beyoncé.

This December, Abraham is premiering his new Park Avenue Armory performance Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful in New York, a piece that will explore the contrast of nature and humanity against the backdrop of the fraught present moment. His ever-impressive roster of collaborators this go-round includes Cao Yuxi, an artist and coder who designed the set, and the avant-garde chamber music group yMusic, which devised the score.

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Though Cassette Vol. 1, 2024, and some of Abraham’s earlier works, such as The Radio Show, 2010, are steeped in nostalgia, the topics informing his choreographies frequently veer into more consequential historical junctures linked to race. The Radio Show, while musically inspired by memories of since-defunct radio stations played on childhood roadtrips, was also meant to acknowledge the echo chamber of the same Black-focused stations, as they simultaneously reported on events like the 2009 murder of Derrion Albert, a 16-year-old who was beaten to death by fellow teenagers on Chicago’s South Side. The Watershed, with sets by artist Glenn Ligon, premiered in 2014, in response to both the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 20th anniversary of the end of South African apartheid.

For the dancer-choreographer, the romanticization of bygone eras is a path to unearthing and reckoning with buried traumas past and present. “Yes, it’s comforting, but there’s also discomfort at times,” Abraham says. “Even in those works that have a certain type of historical lens as the main focal point, they are still meant to be in conversation with how we are living and experiencing the present day.”