The couch is the tip off. Ordinary yet comfortable look, covered in plastic, it’s on stage in Kyle Abraham’s latest work, “An Untitled Love,” which fulfills the function that sofas usually do. Here it indicates that this dance is a house party.
You can tell what kind of party it is from the soundtrack: a playlist drawn from the three major albums of the R&B great D’Angelo. This is sweaty, soulful music, mostly love songs reminiscent of the bedroom, with deep funk subtly and sparingly kept on the back burner to never break the mood.
The guests behave accordingly. In this hour-long work, which debuted in New York on Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, the dancers of Abraham’s company, AIM, come and go as if the stage were just a room in the house. They gather on the couch to gossip and chat. They make movements and mate and disappear for a while. Or – who could resist these grooves? — they decide to dance a little.
And because these are beautiful dancers, that dancing is beautiful, albeit at a low density: idiomatically tuned to the music but exalted. You can imagine this is what it might be like to hang out with these performers in their spare time, watch them go down like the rest of us but casually perform a killer move or some perfect pirouettes or short sync for some shared steps . And then go back to chat, another version of the same activity. “An Untitled Love” beautifully presents dance as interpersonal communication. It is a theatrical love letter to social dance.
At first we don’t hear the chatter, and then we do. In a recent interview, regal elegant dancer Catherine Kirk characterized the show as a “Black love sitcom,” and it’s true. This is standard material, not exceptional like D’Angelo’s voice. There’s a lot of easy, well-known humor about gritty ankles, McRib sandwiches, church, and the untrustworthiness of men — common in a black sitcom, but not so common at the Brooklyn Academy.
Jae Nael is the main cartoon character, strolling through with a Capri-Sun or a salad, falling into crevices and drinking too much. Kirk resists, then gives in to Martell Ruffin’s advances, and in a pause for the dancers, we hear her offstage monologue as she gears up for a date with him, torn between “playing with boys” and the threat of falling for it. life to be single. After he arrives, they seem, confusingly, to return to the first party or something.
That gathering doesn’t sound like the type the cops attract, but an “Untitled Love” darkens as D’Angelo’s voice mingles with the crackle of the police or EMT radio. One by one, the dancers lie face down on the floor, wrists crossed behind their backs (as in several earlier Abraham dances). We hear the unidentified voice of Doc Rivers, the coach of the Los Angeles Clippers, marveling at how an unnamed “they” talk about fear when “we’re the ones getting killed,” and find it amazing “why we love keep loving this country, and this country loves us no more.” A different kind of love and its obstacles.
And then comes D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel)”, which could be considered the title track of this show. It’s a duet for Kirk and Ruffin, but they’re separated by a neon blue line on the floor. She crosses it to bear its weight in tender back bends, but continues to retreat into the shadows as their connection remains unstable. Alone, he builds to a broken explosion, along with D’Angelo’s gospel cry, a penetrating expression of the love within and all that blocks it.
Neal undercuts the tension with a joke and we’re back at the party, with the cast gathering on the couch to watch the incredible Tamisha A. Guy and Claude Johnson dance to romance. As a theater, there are aspects of “An Untitled Love” that I found too easy and familiar, both in the couch-cozy comedy and the commentary. It doesn’t ascend to the magic of “Lovers Rock,” the 2020 Steve McQueen film that puts an entire world into one dance party. But within its good time is much love.
‘A nameless love’
See you Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org.