Few ballets in recent years have attracted as much attention as Kyle Abraham’s The Runaway at the New York Ballet in 2018. In it, Abraham fused elements of classical ballet with street and contemporary dance for an exciting effect – and rave reviews – through his equally varied musical choices (Kanye West and Nico Muhly, Jay-Z and James Blake) and fantastic costumes by Giles Deacon.
It’s hard to follow. And so Abraham consciously took a different path for his new piece for the city ballet “When We Fell”, which will appear on the company’s website and YouTube channel on Thursday, and moved away from the charged atmosphere of “The Runaway” .
In a video interview, Abraham said that the tone and mood of the new piece was partly inspired by his childhood obsession with the Prince film, “Under the Cherry Moon.” (“I asked my mom to rent it every time we went to the video store.”)
“If ‘The Runaway’ were my ‘Purple Rain’,” said Abraham, “this new work would be closer to ‘Cherry Moon'” – a black and white film whose key song for Abraham is “Sometimes it snows in April”. ”
“This dance was very developed in the snow and winter for a premiere in April,” he said. “So there is a kind of homage to all of these things.”
Also in black and white, “When We Fell”, based on piano pieces by Morton Feldman, Jason Moran and Nico Muhly, is an economical, abstract and cinematic homage to the choreographic legacy of the City Ballet, its dancers and its home in Lincoln Center, the David H. Koch Theater where it was filmed. Directed by Abraham and Ryan Marie Helfant, the film reflects the experiences and visual influences of a three-week “bubble” residence in the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, NY, where Abraham worked on the piece with eight dancers.
When he was filming “The Runaway”, Abraham, who comes from the contemporary dance scene, was the first black choreographer to be commissioned by the City Ballet in over a decade. He’s in high demand in the ballet world these days – he’s going to London next week to work on a new play with the Royal Ballet – but like so many people, he has had a difficult year of pandemic.
“There have been a lot of difficulties and so many unknowns for all of us,” he said. “I’ve tried to consider it a blessing to use the online rehearsal time to talk” – something that would be too expensive under normal circumstances – “but it was a challenge.”
In an interview last week, he talked about how he can find a way back to dancing, how bubble residency affects his creative process, and his musical and aesthetic choices. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
You had several assignments and a teaching position at the University of California in Los Angeles. when the pandemic started. What happened after everything shut down?
It was a difficult time. I was about to return to New York to work on a new piece with my company, AIM, and I had just left my Los Angeles apartment. I moved seven times in the first few months. Two of my dancers had left, I was trying to hire new ones, and I didn’t want to work on Zoom or FaceTime.
I’m actually quite introverted, and a lot of my work has dealt with isolation, so it was emotionally difficult to have that real distance. I also had some health problems and couldn’t do much physically. It wasn’t until Lincoln Center asked me to create a solo for Taylor Stanley that I found some confidence in the virtual creation – send material to Taylor, have it mailed back to me, and so on.
How did the Kaatsbaan residence influence the creation of “When We Fell”?
In every sense. When we started, the dancers and I were working on two different materials. But we were in deep winter and snowfall, and something about the silence, the peace, the elements pushed me to what became “When we fell”.
A lot of my decisions had to do with working with Ryan Helfant. I told him about the snow and sent him a winter song playlist. He sent me wonderful pictures that he had taken in the Koch Theater, which inspired me.
Did the dancers take time to get used to being in the studio together?
Yeah, I think people took time to drop the walls. Even approaching a friend is a new negotiation. Some hadn’t danced much in the past few months, and seeing how their bodies handled the work also influenced which direction I went with the piece.
One of the great things about a residence is that they don’t try to manage a lot of different things as they would if we were to work in New York the “normal” way. I don’t know if the amount of subtlety we’ve worked with could have existed in a faster setting. It was a real luxury to work like this.
Besides Prince, what were the other inspirations for the film’s aesthetics?
I also thought of works like Balanchine’s “Agon”. I’m not a ballet dancer, but much of my early education came from people teaching and studying balanchine technique. It’s the Port de Bras, the lower body work that I admired.
Merce Cunningham’s choreography was an influence too – I like the way he tilts body off-center. I wanted to create this kind of functional abstraction.
The ballet is divided into three sections. How did you think about the music?
I was interested in how different the piano can sound and in using that in a single ballet. I knew right away that I was going to use the Feldman I was very attracted to and the Jason Moran. For the third section, I turned to Nico Muhly and asked him for something that hadn’t been used in any other dance. He suggested this piece, “Falling Berceuse”, which I found beautiful in a very special way. There’s a little bit of hope and a little bit of despair in it.
For me, everyone suggests sitting in your window and looking at the falling snow – the first is the initial slow fall that has a kind of melancholy, the second a faster restlessness, the third very internal. I think I’ll add another section for the stage version of this work.
In the short documentary on When We Fell, Taylor Stanley talks about how to incorporate gestures that are meaningful and relevant to the Black Community. Is that a conscious decision?
It’s not that conscious; It’s only part of who I am I come from the rave and club culture where so much has to do with using your torso and like many people I grew up dancing in front of the mirror in my bedroom. I practice a lot of yoga, put one hand on my heart, one on my stomach, or there are gestures to stroke my chest or head.
I want to draw attention to the hybridity between what my body does naturally and what these dancers and their technique do naturally.
How has working with these dancers – and ballet dancers in general – influenced your choreography?
I definitely feel more capable and have more access to opportunity than before. Even in the contemporary work that I do, I allow myself to be more expressive and really work on things for the lower body, which has been much less emphasized in my work. To be honest, I think this has to do with negative comments from my ballet teachers that I recorded.
The city ballet really influenced the way I work. These dancers who are so encouraging make it okay to try these things out. I feel safe in this rehearsal room. I can be vulnerable, and that means the people I work with can also be vulnerable.
