kyle abraham & a.i.m. “love on one another” in an untitled love @ nazareth college arts center, 24 january 2025.
To the music of D’Angelo, choreographer Kyle Abraham’s dance company A.I.M. focused on a loving side of Black American life: the mood of mutual aid, affirmation, exchange, and togetherness. The set featured a domestic vibe, a comfy couch, a few plants, and not much else as the dancers moved through different roles—many about flirting, playing, teasing, supporting, relating, admiring, showing off a bit, and, most of all, finding a few safe spaces within the music’s grooves for living fully in oneself and exchanging, concealed by the thump and the cries of the soundtrack, admiration and appreciation. The ensemble was, as a few members and Abraham himself put it, focused on “loving on one another.”
The larger woes of an anti-Black world occasionally edged in on the love-in. A recorded commentary lifted from the basketball coach Doc Rivers, who remarked, “It’s amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back” after the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020, echoed out into the theater at one point. Mostly, however, the focus was on life wrapped up in music, protected from the broader society.
What was most beautiful was the restraint, with occasional explosions of virtuosity and power of the dancers. Abraham’s bodily vocabulary has often tended in this direction: a kind of casual lurch or lean or leap pushes suddenly into a powerful series of movements, perhaps propulsive balletic spins or an acrobatic jump or a difficult Cunninghamian balancing act. Looseness and fierceness flow out of and into one another. The dancers would do this one by one in An Untitled Love, occasionally slipping into little trios and quartets or ensemble moments of unison dancing.
The most amazing scene in the hour-long performance involved a long, slow-motion dance party early on in the work. Here the dancers played with control and almost-stillness, as if wanting to relish the moment of pleasure, of fun, to make it last. As if to suggest that the restraint of the slo-mo was a way to sustain the break, to dance into it, and maybe linger there awhile, away from the sped-up horror and onslaught of the larger world.
In other scenes, dancers talked and interacted, there were dates and relationships, there was comfort food and some gentle teasing. The work ended with a beautiful “assisted solo,” as Abraham called it, that through contorted arms and a moment of the back hunching over hinted at glints of pain, but returned to a core of sweetness and light, to a potently pure tenderness at the beating heart, that proposed a mighty power emanating from within: a love supreme.
Working in the safe spaces between the beats, not so much the lower frequencies as the gaps of the oscillations, Kyle Abraham and company reminded us that love needs no title—and that all are entitled to its small pleasures and its epic majesty, which sometimes might be one and the same.