INTERVIEW: Hip-hop-inspired dance from Kyle Abraham revived at NYU Skirball
Photo: Live! The Realest MC, from A.I.M., stars Matthew Baker, Jeremy Jae Neal and Claude CJ Johnson. Photo courtesy of Julien Benhamou / Provided by Helene Davis PR with permission.
Kyle Abraham, the Bessie Award-winning choreographer, has crafted many dances that touch upon important issues and feature his unique style of contemporary movements. One of his most celebrated works is Live! The Realest MC, which explores gender roles, masculinity and the world of hip-hop celebrity.
The evening-length work, featuring an ensemble of talented dancers, will play April 4-6 at NYU Skirball in New York City.
“Live! The Realest MC is a work of ours from 2011,” Abraham said in a recent phone interview. “It was a really exciting work in some ways for us because it was coming at this period where I was trying to make sure that each project would be really different from the one that came before it. … So the work that came right before it was called The Radio Show, which had won a Bessie. It’s all set to old soul and contemporary R&B music, and this project was in a lot of ways a very different exploration. It’s set to industrial sounds and some harsh feeds, and really taking a darker tone.”
In some ways, Live! The Realest MC plays with the ideas brought to bear in Pinocchio. Abraham simply throws in some hip-hop and an industrial lens. Instead of the central character yearning to become a real boy, the choreographer has the action focused on becoming a hip-hop MC in the early 1990s.
It’s no coincidence that the early 1990s hip-hop scene informs the work. That is the time period Abraham was in high school, when he had to make a choice to stand out, go unnoticed in the hallways or perhaps blend in with the norm of the day.
“It’s a show that definitely has darker tones,” he said. “It has some comedy in it and some emotional moments as well. I think for audiences, who are either new to my work or maybe have seen my work but haven’t seen it in a while, I think you’ll get a nice range of technical dancing, humor, emotional moments.”
Abraham used to dance in the piece, but this is the first time he won’t be on stage in Live!, at least in the New York City area. Now he is able to take a purely third-person angle to the piece and perhaps appreciate the obvious inspiration in the movement from the mind of Merce Cunningham.
“There’s some faster-paced movement in there for sure and some really crazy, technical moments that are for me fun challenges for the dancers,” he said. “[The dancers] know that I give them three different options. It’s interesting to see which choice they make in which performance.”
Abraham’s dance company is called Abraham.In.Motion, or A.I.M. They will present the work at NYU Skirball, and it’s not easy to revive a work.
To stage Live!, Abraham needs to rely on the expertise of his company members. For example, Matthew Baker and Tamisha Guy run rehearsals when Abraham is teaching at UCLA in the winter months. Catherine Ellis Kirk, who has been in the piece for some time, will also offer feedback to the performers.
“Then I will get to look at it and not only give my feedback but make some changes that hopefully make the work breathe a little bit better,” he said. “Being that I was in it, it was a lot harder to step outside the overall big picture of the work, so now it’s nice to watch the dancers work on this reflective work in a sense and think about what I can do to make the work really hold true to the themes that I wanted to talk about or express in some way.”
Abraham said he is curious to see what the response to Live! The Realest MC will be like in 2019. The evening-length work has toured the world, and he has been soaking in the reactions from audience members.
“I’d like to think that people can still connect to it,” he said. “For me, it was definitely in some ways an abstracted look back at my high school experience, but more than that because identity is a big part of the work and in some ways a buzz word that people are using today for whatever reason … we’re definitely at a time that it’s all the more important for people to be seen and for individual experiences to be recognized and respected.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Live! The Realest MC, choreographed by Kyle Abraham and presented by A.I.M., will play April 4-6 at NYU Skirball in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
