The basketball court that forms the set of Pavement is like those that can be found in any city in the world, and it’s this universal quality that makes Kyle Abraham’s work so affecting as political dance theatre. He draws on very specific sources – his childhood in Pittsburgh, the LA gang drama Boyz N the Hood – yet this portrait of angry, wired, funny and hopeful young people has a resonance that goes far wider. Set to a musical collage that ranges from Bach to Sam Cook, taking movement from ballet, street and contemporary dance, Pavement transcends its origins to become a picture of the modern world.
It’s Abraham who opens the work, dancing solo to some vintage blues, and as the sassy homeboy angles of his body language yield to a more softly fluid inwardness, we get our first glimpse of how richly yet concisely evocative his choreography can be. Pavement is essentially a series of vignettes in which Abraham and his six dancers represent a marginalised community of young lives – male and female, black and white. The violence that surrounds them daily is brutally delivered by a soundtrack of sirens and gun battles, exchanges between racist cops, gang members and precociously tough little boys. But the violence is no less vivid in the choreography, both in its signature image of hands being cuffed behind backs and in the brawling jittery aggression that continually threatens the formal surface of the movement.
Abraham, however, is equally interested in the soul of his onstage community. He is an intensely musical choreographer, and whether he’s setting hip-hop to Verdi or ballet to Hudson Mohawk, his characters’ interior grace shines through their often very beautiful dancing. He has a genius, too, for combining the stylised and vernacular, as in the flawlessly natural duet with which he shows two of his characters falling hesitantly in love.
Pavement’s one minor weakness lies in its slightly irresolute structure, yet its closing moments are haunting in their ambivalence. One by one the dancers stack themselves in piles upon the floor, as if awaiting prison or the morgue, yet in the way their bodies nestle tenderly together we start to see a protective camaraderie. Young inner-city lives might not matter to governments but the point of Abraham’s beautifully observed work is they can matter, very much, to each other.
