The sofa is the tip off. Peculiar however comfy-looking, lined in plastic, it’s onstage all through Kyle Abraham’s latest work, “An Untitled Love,” serving the operate that couches often do. Right here it indicators that this dance is a home social gathering.
You’ll be able to inform what sort of social gathering it’s by the soundtrack: a playlist drawing from the three main albums by the R&B nice D’Angelo. That is sweaty, soulful music, largely love songs suggestive of the bed room, with deep funk saved refined and spare on a low burner in order by no means to interrupt the temper.
The visitors behave accordingly. On this hourlong work, which had its New York debut on the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater on Wednesday, the dancers in Abraham’s firm, A.I.M, come and go as if the stage have been only a room in the home. They collect on the sofa to gossip and banter. They make strikes and pair off and disappear for some time. Or — who might resist these grooves? — they determine to bounce a bit.
And since these are beautiful dancers, that dancing is beautiful, if low-density: idiomatically attuned to the music however heightened. You’ll be able to think about that that is what it is perhaps like to hold with these performers of their off time, watching them get down like the remainder of us however casually throw in a killer transfer or a couple of excellent pirouettes or briefly sync up for some shared steps. After which return to chatting, a special model of the identical exercise. “An Untitled Love” fantastically presents dance as interpersonal communication. It’s a theatrical love letter to social dance.
At first we don’t hear the chatting, after which we do. In a current interview, the regally elegant dancer Catherine Kirk characterised the present as a “Black love sitcom,” and that’s correct. That is commonplace materials, not distinctive like D’Angelo’s voice. There’s a number of straightforward, acquainted humor about ashy ankles, McRib sandwiches, church and the unreliability of males — abnormal in a Black sitcom, however not so widespread on the Brooklyn Academy.
Jae Nael is the principle comedian determine, sauntering via with a Capri-Solar or some salad, dropping into splits, consuming an excessive amount of. Kirk resists then offers in to the advances of Martell Ruffin, and in a break for the dancers, we hear her offstage monologue as she will get prepared for a date with him, torn between “enjoying with boys” and the specter of being single for all times. After he arrives, they appear, confusingly, to finish up again on the first social gathering or one similar to it.
That gathering doesn’t sound like the sort to draw the cops, however an “Untitled Love” turns darker as D’Angelo’s voice mixes with the crackle of police, or EMT, radio. One after the other, the dancers lie face down on the ground, wrists crossed behind their backs (as in a number of earlier Abraham dances). We hear the unidentified voice of Doc Rivers, the coach of the Los Angeles Clippers, marveling at how an unnamed “they” discuss worry when “we’re those getting killed,” and discovering it superb “why we preserve loving this nation, and this nation doesn’t love us again.” One other sort of love and its obstacles.
After which comes D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Really feel),” which might be thought of this present’s title monitor. It’s a duet for Kirk and Ruffin, however they’re separated by a neon blue line on the bottom. She crosses it to take his weight in tender backbends but retains receding into the shadows as their connection stays unstable. Alone, he builds to a damaged explosion together with D’Angelo’s gospel scream, a piercing expression of the love inside and all that blocks it.
Neal undercuts the strain with a joke, and we’re again on the social gathering, with the forged gathering on the sofa to observe the unimaginable Tamisha A. Man and Claude Johnson dance into romance. As theater, there are points of “An Untitled Love” I discovered too straightforward and acquainted, each within the couch-cozy comedy and the commentary. It doesn’t rise to the magic of “Lovers Rock,” the 2020 Steve McQueen movie that will get an entire world right into a single dance social gathering. However inside its good time is an excessive amount of love.
‘An Untitled Love’
By way of Saturday on the Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org.
