Anyone can assemble a playlist of what they were rocking out to in their youth but Kyle Abraham, a child of the early MTV generation, folds in the rhythmic DNA of 1960s postmodern dance. In Cassette Vol. 1 created for his company A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, the loose, swinging, tilting wheeling-about from the mesmerizing non-dance dances of Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer and other Judson School pioneers is grafted onto chart-toppers of the mid ‘80s to ‘90s like REM’s The One I Love and Prince’s Let’s Work, with startlingly beautiful results.
Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels brought the work to New York University’s Skirball theater, where designer Dan Scully set the scene as the audience filed in: a payphone kiosk, a boombox and a haphazard cluster of shiny, naked white mannequins, like sleeper-cell extraterrestrials. Vintage monitors suspended above the stage flashed clips of Carl Lewis harvesting gold at the 1984 L.A. Olympics, Thatcher, Reagan and Gorbachev practising statesmanship, Michael Jordan leading the Bulls to victory, O.J. and Nicole’s wedding, the Exxon Valdez oil spill – halcyon times compared with our present state of emergency.
Dancers in billowy Day-Glo parachute-nylon tracksuits and teased wigs jogged on backward, U-turned and jogged off again to a blithe, shimmering soundtrack. William Okajima, in the tracksuit de rigueur, kept his distance from the cool kids, observing them with curiosity and scribbling in a notebook as if conducting field research. In a slender but charming development, he fell for Gianna Theodore, initiating a tender courtship by placing his Walkman headphones on her head and sharing a mixtape. This was preceded by a comic struggle with the ribbon unspooling from the plastic shell of an analog magnetic recording once known as a cassette tape.
The ensemble twirled their wrists, dove forward in deep plié and tipped off-axis at perilous angles with a studied nonchalance that belied a formidable technique – it’s not easy to make this stuff look easy. Voguing and a glancing martial-arts kick punctuated the bouncy, fluid postmodern on-goingness.
Mykiah Goree, Faith Joy Mondesire and Olivia Wang didn’t Walk Like an Egyptian but commanded the stage as coolly as The Bangles, hitching up their pants leg to show pointed feet beating crisply at the ankles. In The Pointer Sisters’ Jump, Niya Smith stayed anchored to Earth, brandishing a high extension like a sceptre. Billy Idol’s Dancing with Myself occasioned an inspired turn by guest artist Taylor Stanley of New York City Ballet, in slow-mo contortions through a string of vintage dance moves – the robot, churning butter, finger guns and the Alf – big hair, gauzy tank and track pants whipped by a standing fan. In hard backlight through haze against a glowing cyc, they evoked the Maniac sequence from Flashdance with the dancer gyrating under a sudden downpour, here the wind from a standing fan.
Lyrics in this musical age were often silly or overwrought – to which the dancers responded with stoicism. As Bananarama sang “I’m your Venus, I’m your fire, at your desire” a trio moved mechanically, held an airplane pose, and marched in place with arms pumping and hips rocking, as if doing the least amount of work needed to meet their daily cardio goal. When Cyndi Lauper “drove all night, to get to you, this fever for you just burning me up inside,” the unmoved dancers mustered a single throbbing shoulder to mark the irresistible beat.
Absurdity peaked with The B-52’s Rock Lobster, unleashing a hail of rubber-fringe balls and plush toys. In the ensuing chaos, Taylor Stanley dashed on and off, first wielding a tiny battery-operated fan, then a ping-pong paddle with an attached ball, whose mechanics defeated them.
Extreme’s syrupy ballad, More than Words, framed the final section, emerging first from Okajima’s Walkman as he and Theodore huddled downstage, then broadcast into the house as Destin Morisset and Alysia Johnson danced an unfolding sense of the possibilities of a Walkman-enabled romance. The colorful plush toys littering the stage and Abraham’s bracing mix of release-based and contemporary technique kept this scene suspended between the sentimental and the surreal, until the final, touching beat.
Abraham has magnetized the filaments of ’80s pop culture into a coolly wistful longing – not so much for an idealized past as for a future in which music and dance forms are reinvented free of the legacy of appropriation and erasure that has long excluded Black artists and artists of color. It took MTV about a decade to program Black musicians in meaningful numbers.
In a coda after the curtain call, Stanley tore up the stage to Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes as a stagehand swept up the plush toys with an industrial broom. Shoulder shimmies and hip thrusts matched the blues-rocker’s whiskey-and-smoke growl; brisées, beaten assemblés and other crisp balleticisms were spliced into the mix with casual virtuosity – proof that, like Abraham’s dancers, Stanley contains multitudes.
