The figure in blue moved so slowly that time appeared to bend around him. At Kyle Abraham’s Homecoming Gala, an excerpt from White Space held the room in that exquisite suspension: a body reaching toward something it could neither name nor surrender. Ache and joy arrived together. Fear passed through the movement, followed by tenderness. Abraham understands that the human condition rarely offers its emotions one at a time. In his choreography, grief pulses beneath pleasure, while a gesture that looks like an ending can become the first breath of another life.
The September 25 gala at Jazz at Lincoln Center featured excerpts from White Space and The Bystander and introduced a new name for the company formerly known as A.I.M by Kyle Abraham: Kyle Abraham Dance Vanguard. The word vanguard felt entirely at home with what I had seen. Abraham allows classical discipline, contemporary freedom, and the vernacular intelligence of hip-hop to speak to one another until the body seems capable of telling a truth that language has been too frightened, or too limited, to hold.
The full White Space extends that conversation across an evening-length work for 11 dancers. Composers Jason Moran and Nico Muhly have created a score played by two pianists at a single piano, with recorded hip-hop sounds entering its musical world. Abraham has reunited with visual artist Glenn Ligon on the scenic design, while Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung designed the costumes and Dan Scully the lighting. Those collaborations give shape to a work in which the polished and the raw, the imagined and the painfully real, seem continually to meet. Even in excerpt, its emotional reach was immense.
Dance has long possessed this extraordinary power to carry us across the distance between another person’s life and our own. In 1958, Alvin Ailey founded a company that placed Black experience at the center of American concert dance. Two years later, Revelations gave sorrow and jubilation a shared vocabulary that audiences around the world could feel in their bones. Abraham inherits that artistic possibility while speaking unmistakably in the tense of our own moment. His work is sensual and rigorous, urbane and unsettled. Within it, Black bodies have room for virtuosity, ambiguity, softness, fury, humor, and beauty, with no single quality asked to stand for the whole.
His genius lies partly in refusing to explain away what a body reveals. A dancer can hesitate, recoil, open, and reach again without becoming an illustration of a prescribed idea. We recognize the tremor before a choice or the courage required to move after loss, yet something remains gloriously unknowable. That space between recognition and mystery allows the work to transcend. It asks us to feel with another person while respecting all that we cannot claim to understand.
Later, honoree Sherrilyn Ifill spoke of the harvest. She and her contemporaries, she reflected, came of age able to reap what earlier generations had planted: opportunities for women and minorities won through years of imagination, organization, and sacrifice. Those gains did not spring from benevolent soil. People cultivated them when the country gave them every reason to believe the ground would never yield. Today, she suggested, we cannot assume the same opportunities will be waiting for those who follow us.
Her words changed the meaning of everything we had witnessed. The rights and openings we inherit were once improbable acts of collective imagination. Each required people to work beyond the horizon of what they might live to see. Now, as protections falter and hard-won possibilities narrow, the task returns to us. Artists and visionaries give us a feast in barren land. They offer beauty, language, and new ways of seeing when the future seems starved of possibility. Their gifts can awaken us; our response must determine whether they can continue to create, and whether those who come after us will have the chance to do the same.
Abraham’s company has given that responsibility material form. Kyle Abraham Dance Vanguard describes year-round employment, benefits, professional development, and continuing royalties for dancers who help create new work. The choreography may appear to transcend gravity, yet the people making it need dependable ground beneath their feet. To recognize their genius fully is to value the labor and lives that sustain it.
The evening also honored Melonie D. Parker, while chef Kwame Onwuachi brought another art to the table. Speaking about food, he evoked the profound human wish to taste, feel, see, and experience, even at the end of a life. His dinner gave that thought delicious form. Onwuachi’s short rib was the finest I have ever tasted: impossibly tender, richly layered, and destined to haunt my appetite long after the evening had ended. At Tatiana, as on Abraham’s stage, a singular imagination can make someone feel vividly present in the world.
I left with that first image still inside me: the figure in blue, moving through fear without allowing fear to decide where the movement ended. Abraham had shown us what it feels like to imagine another passage. Ifill had reminded us who must help make one possible. We can fight for marginalized voices to be seen, heard, praised, and compensated. We can protect the artists who enlarge our sense of what a life might be. We can plant what we may never personally reap. That is how an evening of dance becomes more than an escape from the world: it sends us back into it with work to do.
