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abcjili Review: Feeling Frazzled? This Dance Reacts to an Age of Anxiety
The choreographer Kyle Abraham is full of anxiety and fear, he has said, feelings that have landed him in a place of fragility. While this hardly sets him apart in this day and age, his latest work, “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,” attempts to thread those feelings into a dance. Abraham, a MacArthur Fellow, is capable of much, but this would be hard for anyone to pull off.
The dance opens with Abraham in a running solo, winding around the stage in counterclockwise circles. His expression holds the happy verve of a young man caught somewhere between boyhood and adolescence. His arms are stretched nearly straight. He smiles with guileless innocence.
But soon his sprint slows and his legs start to lope as his arms swing with less force. He teeters here and there, his forward motion cut short by spins that twist his solitary form before it rights itself again. His chin dips, his spine curves and his steps turn into more of a shuffle as he inches toward the edge of the stage. After one last look — a lingering, stilted pause — he leaves.
That stilted sensation comes up more than once in this well-meaning but often lackluster dance. “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,” which premiered at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday, explores ideas about solitude and isolation: Is there the possibility of change in a world steeped with sorrow? Yet just as the world seems stuck, so does this dance, which gets lost in a loop with more choreographic recycling than renewal.
While there are hints at desolation — at times the dancers wilt to the floor where they remain for varying times, curled on their sides — what predominates is the kind of sadness that flattens you out, the kind that can go on for ages before you decide to do anything about it.
A commissioned score, performed live by the six-member chamber ensemble yMusic, amounted to a generic mishmash of strings, horns and the occasional voice. The video projection design was by the new media artist Cao Yuxi, also known as JAMES.
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