NATURE STUDIES

Kyle Abraham's “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful.”

- JENNIFER HOMANS

Abraham's dance memoir unfolds in finely wrought patterns.

Kyle Abraham is one of today’s most sought-after choreographers. He has been on the downtown contemporary-dance scene for more than two decades, and in 2006 he founded his own company, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham (the initials stand for Abraham in Motion), focussing on Black and queer culture. Abraham’s career took off, with international tours and commissions from major companies; in 2018, he brought the music of Kanye West into the sanctum of New York City Ballet. The dances I’ve seen are always accomplished and full of ideas, but now he has done something truly extraordinary: “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,” which had its world première recently at the Park Avenue Armory, is a deeply personal portrait of his depressed inner state, set against the splendor of the world around him. He made it for himself and sixteen dancers, mostly from A.I.M, and it marks his return to dancing in this ensemble.

In the program notes, Abraham, who is forty-seven, writes about aging, the fragility of memory, and his father’s early-onset dementia. He began work on the dance in 2021, and he laments the “chaos of pandemic debris”; he also references the environmental crisis, Octavia Butler’s “apocalyptic narrative of Black American Futures,” and his own “fading hope and prayer” for change. These are thoughts. Yet the work he has made has no narrative and no familiar gestures. It is a fully abstract dance that, like nature and aging, works organically, seeping into us through skin and eyes and ears. And it is a beauty.