Graham Watts sees A.I.M by Kyle Abraham in An Untitled Love – an absorbing piece of dance theatre.
The Rose Prize is the latest initiative to try to do for dance what the Turner and the Booker have respectively done for art and literature. It’s a bold ambition and we should wish it well (I have fond memories of The Place Prize, which regrettably lasted for just five iterations from 2004-2013).
Fourteen ‘global nominators’ – almost all women – have scoured the world of dance to put forward recommendations which were then whittled down by a central panel of ‘selectors’ to seven works: four are competing for the main Rose award of £40,000 while three others are up for the Bloom prize of £15,000, for choreographers with less than 10 years’ experience. Why, from a whole world full of dance, there are just three Bloom contenders is a mystery!
Kyle Abraham seems to be everywhere all at once, whether it be The Weathering, recently repeated by The Royal Ballet; Love Letter (on shuffle) brought to Sadler’s Wells by a group of New York City Ballet dancers; or Are You in Your Feelings? for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT), for which Abraham won last year’s UK National Dance Award for Best Modern Choreography. Unlike these works, An Untitled Love was made on his own company – A.I.M by Kyle Abraham – and was first performed in the UK at the Edinburgh International Festival, in 2022.
It’s certainly an absorbing piece of dance theatre, at just over an hour’s duration (sixty minutes being the minimum requirement for the Rose Prize), in which dance sits alongside a good deal of spoken text (some of which I found inaudible). In fact, it often felt as if we were throwbacks to being a studio audience for an 80s sitcom (somewhere between Fresh Prince and an Afro-Caribbean version of Friends).
This sitcom domesticity was emphasised by a four-seater sofa framed by a pot plant and standard lamps, and the easy-going music further suggested the coolest of house parties. The excellent music for An Untitled Love is by the neo-soul, Grammy Award-winning R&B artist, D’Angelo.
Cool is the persistent vibe throughout this roller-coaster ride of adult relationships. Abraham boldly takes risks, such as allowing an empty stage while Catherine Kirk’s voiceover describes her doubts while preparing for a first date with a man who seems more preoccupied by his ‘wheels’ being permanently in the repair shop. In what seemed like an apt statement, she met her new beau, dressed in an elegant silver, halter-necked trouser suit, while he turned up in an open shirt over a grey vest!
Abraham is unashamed of wearing sentiment on the sleeve of his choreography. Just as notions of love and loss characterise The Weathering, and the titles of Love Letter and Are You in Your Feelings? speak for themselves, so this piece is also a celebration of love, but particularly in the context of Black American culture. It takes many forms in the relationships between the ten performers, some of whom have been with Abraham for more than a decade. There is a gorgeous, sensual same-sex love duet for Keturah Stephen and Gianna Theodore and their relationship is a leitmotif that reoccurs throughout the piece. Jae Neal – a trans and nonbinary dancer who has been with Kyle Abraham’s A.I.M since 2011- was a charismatic presence throughout the piece.
Abraham’s choreography is interlaced with many diverse influences and here in An Untitled Love, his freestyle contemporary movement has influences of Tango, ballroom and even ballet. The dance is not a permanent feature of the work – performers spend time sitting on that sofa or milling around in small groups – but when it hits, its an adrenaline rush of lithe, smooth groove. The dancers are all outstanding and there is a very smart centrepiece of slow-motion movement for the whole ensemble that is exceptionally well performed with expert timing and disciplined muscle control.
Abraham’s ‘house’ on this stage is a vibrant place of cool sounds, the changing drawings on the projected backdrop (scenic design by Dan Scully; visual art by Joe Buckingham) were difficult to fathom with sundry graffiti and roughly drawn imagery of record decks. But, most of all it’s a place where people regularly come and go – more shades of the open house nature of those old sitcoms – honouring the extended families that are part-and-parcel of Black American households (in his programme note, Abraham refers to the aunts and uncles that ‘we all have that aren’t blood relatives’).
The comedic elements of the spoken and physical text were subtle and endearing and this was an innovative work to represent North America in the final Rose Prize quartet.
Emma Gladstone’s last project, prior to her death, last year, was to set up the Rose Prize and these performances are very fittingly dedicated to her memory.
Related
Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA). He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge’s Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.
He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv. He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.
