Photo by Steven Schreiber. Courtesy Abraham.In.Motion dance company.
When Pittsburgh’s WAMO signed off the air in September of 2009, it meant far more to Kyle Abraham than just the closing of a radio station. “I looked at it as a loss of voice for a community,” says the dancer/choreographer whose piece The Radio Show will have its Atlanta premiere at Emory’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts Dance Studio at 8PM this Thursday, February 23, 2012, with additional performances on Friday and Saturday (click here for ticket info).
“I started thinking about what radio is to a community, especially an urban community,” continues Abraham. “People called in, voicing their opinion in a way that, to me, is a connection to therapy or counseling. They had their voices heard. To not have that, what does that do to a community?”
The Radio Show, which originally premiered at Pittsburgh’s Kelly Strayhorn theater in 2010, was Abraham’s first evening-length work, an elegy for the last independent radio station in his hometown, created for his company of seven dancers (four women and three men, including himself). The first half involves the closing of WAMO, and the second, more personal half deals with Abraham’s father, who had Alzheimer’s which led to aphasia, or loss of voice.
“I tried to make a connection between those two things, also thinking about memory and how music is so relevant and connected to our memories,” he says. “The parallel for me is the loss of the voice.”
A Pittsburgh native, Abraham grew up listening and dancing to the music played by WAMO’s sister stations AM 860 and 106.7 FM: classic soul, R&B, rap, and pop, which all feature in the show along with samples of the listener call-ins that were the currency of the old station. Abraham’s signature movement style in the show is a seamless blend of street and club dancing with more academic classical and contemporary influences.
Photo by Steven Schreiber. Courtesy Abraham.In.Motion dance company.
“I think of club dancing as just another form of improvisation,” he says. “The movement I have in my system, in my body, is a hodgepodge of Cunningham, Graham, hip-hop, Capoeira, classical ballet. It’s all in there, but it’s rarely ever separated or segmented. My movement style is a hybrid of movement that I’m inspired by.”
Abraham began dancing as a performer relatively late, at the age of 17, but he’d been dancing in other outlets long before then, going to raves at the age of 14 where he danced to the popular dance music of the ’90s: jungle and drum and bass.
“We’d just go out and dance all night, and my mother was fine with it,” he says.
Photo by Steven Schreiber. Courtesy Abraham.In.Motion dance company.
Abraham never considered a career in professional dance until a high school friend brought Abraham to see the Joffrey Ballet’s performance of Billboards, a 1993 piece set to the music of Prince. “It was the first dance performance I ever went to,” he recalls. “I was blown away.”
The same friend suggested he audition for summer dance programs and at a performing arts high school his senior year. These led to scholarships at SUNY Purchase and Tisch School of the Arts. After graduation, Abraham danced with a number of prestigious New York-based companies including David Dorfman and Bill T. Jones.
Since forming his own company Abraham.In.Motion in 2006, Abraham has been on the forefront of the contemporary dance scene, winning awards and accolades: OUT Magazine may have summed it up best, describing Abraham as one of the “best and brightest creative talents to emerge out of New York City in the age of Obama.”
Abraham says he seeks dancers for his company who, like him, have an aesthetic that doesn’t draw distinctions between styles of dance. “Dancers tend to focus on one thing,” he says. “They want to be a Graham dancer, a Cunningham dancer, a Limón dancer. The dancers I tend to choose are open to all the styles.”
