Author: Sophie Myrtil-McCourty

DANCECleveland brings Kyle Abraham’s dance company, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, to Playhouse Square this weekend for one performance of his latest evening-length work, An Untitled Love. As the title suggests, this is a dance about love: romantic love, love within the Black community, and love of music, specifically the R&B music of Grammy winner D’Angelo. Who…

Thankfully, the A.I.M. troupe followed on the bill, and with the NY premiere of “Our Indigo: If We Were a Love Song” Kyle Abraham’s winning streak continues. This work, set to six Nina Simone tracks, was the polar opposite of the aggressively pandering Streb antics. In fact, much of the dancing was done facing the…

Another way Abraham researched the evening-length work, set to run Nov. 13 at the Byham Theater, was by hosting an event with friends of his late parents. In 2018, as part of a residency with what’s now the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, he gathered friends and family members to talk about “the way…

“It’s a celebratory work in a lot of ways,” Kyle Abraham says. “So much of the conversation around the Black experience has been focused on the untimely deaths of Black and brown bodies and the extreme racial injustice we face. I wanted to make a work focused on love, and how we love.” Of course,…

‘Here you can see a triumphant rotation in arabesque, a self-confident balance like that of Balanchine, there the tilting and turning of an upper body like with Merce Cunningham, in the transitions the freedom of a Bill T. Jones. There are people who fall, there are dancers lying on the ground like dead who are being…

‘The dancers balance barefoot through the existential experiment, plunge into ecstasy, touch the grief with swinging arms. They let themselves fall into the music, as undramatic as they are virtuoso, and shine with phenomenal versatility. Viewed rightly, the evening reflects US dance iconography and its legends: the expressive emphasis of Martha Graham, the black dance…