BODIES POLITIC

Jamar Roberts at New York City Ballet.

- BY JENNIFER HOMANS

Roberts's "Foreseeable Future," featuring costumes by Iris van Herpen.

Jamar Roberts is the choreographer of the moment. His dances are in demand, with commissions from ballet and modern-dance companies across the country, including two world premières this season in New York. His work is often highly political: he has taken on gun violence, COVID isolation, and protest; now, with “Foreseeable Future,” for New York City Ballet, he addresses climate change. In a recent interview, he explained that he had read a newspaper report about climate protesters disrupting an N.Y.C.B. performance, and, although he found this “rude” to the dancers, he also felt that the protesters “were kinda right.” He wanted to “disrupt” what he sees as the escapist and perfectionist aspect of ballet with a dance about the threat of human extinction. A ballet, but also a provocation, one that raises a longstanding question: In a time of political crisis, what can art and artists do?

Roberts, who is forty-two and grew up in Miami, joined the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre at nineteen and danced there for nearly two decades, until 2021. He began to make dances in 2016, and his early choreography—astonishingly original and powerful—was inextricably tied to his own dancing and the ways he could morph his majestic six-foot-four body as if it were molten. I have rarely seen a dancer who projects such humility and calm while sustaining an intense physicality and focus on movement itself. And, although his choreography frequently treats political themes, he is a pure dance formalist. This creates a tension in his work: he doesn’t make statements; he makes dances, and his best political work is expressed through the abstract movement that characterizes his dancing. A choreographer in a dancer’s skin.