“Where will you be in five years?” This is the opening line of choreographer Kyle Abraham’s program note for his new evening-length work Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful, having its world premiere today (Dec. 3) at the Park Avenue Armory. Those words might suggest the shudder of an awkward job interview, but to Abraham, they are so much more than that. Since 2021, when he began creating the large-scale commission in earnest, that question has haunted him, whispering its myriad meanings—ranging from the personal to the political to the universal—in his ear. It hurled him into the Afrofuturist work of Octavia Butler and brought him to Richard Powers’ cautionary novel The Overstory. It left him pondering the aging body and mind, the anxiety of possible futures, the miracle of trees and nature and humanity and empathy and the fragile uncertainty of life.
While much has changed during the creation of Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful, most notably the cast of dancers, those original musings and themes have remained the same. The resulting dance-based performance, which includes a commissioned live score by a sextet chamber ensemble and stunning nature-based video projections, promises to hold space for all those things and more.
The movement
Abraham is a sought-after American choreographer (and MacArthur Fellow) known for his uniquely cool blend of modern dance techniques, from ballet to hip hop. He has created work for world-class dance companies such as the New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and The Royal Ballet, and he is the Artistic Director of A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, which he founded in 2006.
Though this is Abraham’s first time making a work for the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall in the Park Avenue Armory, he has many evening-length works under his belt. His creative process, he told Observer, always begins in the same way. “It usually starts with me sitting down and writing out what it is that I want to say and do. It’s somewhat like a scientist writing a hypothesis. I’m bringing these different things together, and then I plan on experimenting and seeing if something sticks or seems valid.”
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He then shares this narrative with his dancers and artistic collaborators so that everyone understands the roots of the work in progress. His choreography grows from those words, images and ideas. As to whether the movement originates from his body or his dancers’ bodies depends on the piece. An Untitled Love (2022), he explained, was mostly choreography that he created before meeting with his company. His next work, Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth (2022), was made largely in collaboration with the company. Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful is a mix of both those choreographic techniques, he said, “but still much more leaning towards a lot of it coming from my body.”
This is a very personal piece for Abraham. “All my work is personal, in different ways. But these are my feelings. What I am experiencing right now.” Of course, ‘right now’ has changed over the past few years, which has been part of the artistic challenge he set for himself: to be as connected as he could be to his ever-changing present self. And because of this, he decided he should perform in the work—something he hadn’t done in over a decade. “If I’m addressing all these things that I’m experiencing and struggling with, it would be really a disservice to what it is I want to be saying, to not be in it and not share that vulnerability and that sadness and that frustration.”
Performing with Abraham are sixteen dancers, some from his company and some freelance dancers he has either worked with in the past or hoped to work with.
The music
Abraham was first introduced to yMusic by the composer Ryan Lott, a mutual friend. He has long admired the innovative, genre-defying American chamber ensemble and knew he wanted to collaborate with them for this piece. “Just thinking about what the makeup of their ensemble is,” he said, “it felt like it was really going to connect and resonate well with what I was hoping to make in the studio.”
The instrumental makeup of the ensemble is indeed unusual: flute, clarinet, trumpet, French horn, violin, guitar, viola and cello. “The particular instrumentation of our group didn’t, to our knowledge, exist before we formed our group,” yMusic violist Nadia Sirota told Observer. Because of this, they have had to commission most of the work they’ve played over the past sixteen years. In 2023, though, they released YMUSIC, the first album made up entirely of music they composed themselves. Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful marks their first opportunity to compose an evening-length score, and the process has been “very fruitful.”
The creative collaboration began with Abraham sending over his written narrative. Sirota remembers a long document with thoughts of aging and mental acuity and trees and dust and leaves and interconnectedness. “And that was such a wonderful and inspiring place to sort of leap off from,” she said. They began composing sections based on those ideas without having seen any choreography.
Then, for about a year, they maintained a “creative pen pal relationship,” yMusic’s flutist Alex Sopp explained. Abraham would send them videos of choreography, and they would send him audio files of sections they were working on. “He was also really helpful with moods and descriptors for not how the dance looks,” Sopp said, “but more like little sentences of something that he’s thinking about while he was making it. It was very abstracted, but that’s actually really helpful creatively.”
Sirota spoke about the unexpected translations that occurred in the collaborative process. Sometimes they would read a sentence from Abraham or see a video of a rehearsal, and it would make them think of something else and change the way that they were composing. “And maybe that’s not even the way that he intended it, but I love these sort of weird mistranslations that result in us making stuff we wouldn’t have made otherwise, and him responding to that, hopefully in a way that he wouldn’t have otherwise.”
Creating an evening-length score for dance was a “really fun” challenge for yMusic. Used to the tight-knit structure of songs, they got to play around with expansion, building tension, and juxtaposing slower sections with quicker-paced bursts. CJ Camerieri, yMusic’s trumpet and French horn player, likened it to film scoring. “We want the listener to be able to sit back, take a deep breath, let a sound wash over them and then get back to something. We paced it for the listener, but it is also nicely paced for us as a result.” Camerieri also spoke of the joy of seeing their music interpreted by dancers. “It’s so thrilling to see. Like this one piece, where we play a line in unison, and then we slowly break away. One person echoes it, two people echo it, and to see them interpret that gesture with dance. It’s like, oh my god! It’s really happening!”
The visuals
Abraham first encountered the work of new media artist Cao Yuxi (JAMES) at an exhibition in London called “LUX: New Wave of Contemporary Art.” There, he saw Cao’s “Shan Shui Paintings By A.I.” which used an artificial intelligence algorithm to generate ever-changing traditional Chinese ink-style paintings on large-scale curved LED screens. Abraham was impressed and reached out soon after to brainstorm a collaboration. When he received the Park Avenue Armory commission, he knew he’d found his opportunity.
Cao is an artist and coder based in Shenzhen and New York City who defines himself as “an idealist trying to redeem his pledge under the social pragmatism pressure.” His works, ranging from installations to live performances, from sound visualizations to real-time graphic programming, have been presented at museums and festivals around the world. In 2022, he had the honor of being the visual effects director for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
“I try to merge this left brain and right brain stuff together,” Cao told Observer, “and create something powered by the computer. It’s not commercial stuff,” he clarified. “It’s fine art. Weird stuff.”
When creating the digital scenic design for Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful, Cao relied not only on Abraham’s narrative and rehearsal footage but also on yMusic’s score. Even though the composition was still being created alongside his own creation, Cao leaned on the music for emotional and logistical cues. “I took great inspiration, especially about pacing, from the music,” he said. “For me, the pacing is very calm, a little bit sad, actually.”
Cao has created installations for many contemporary dance and theater performances but feels that this piece is different in that the visual element “isn’t just showing off, like ‘Hey, I’m a particle, I can move! Look at me, I’m so fancy’!” It’s more about coordinating with the dancers and the choreography, “making it into a whole piece.”
The program Cao uses to create real-time particle animations can move very quickly, he explained. “But this time, we want to go gentle. We want to go slow. We want the kind of magical moment where the audience sees the piece. They don’t see a video or a particle animation. No, we want them to feel like it’s a magic carpet, or magic texture, gradually morphing and changing without your noticing,”
When trying to explain how his program works and whether the particle animation is exactly the same for every performance, Cao said, “Imagine if we are making a real waterfall stage. Real
For Cao, the creative process is not finished until an audience is present. “Then, for me, the whole atmosphere, the chi, the vibe is finished. It’s like they’re part of this ceremonial experience.” He paused and then added: “Live performance, for me, is magic.”
Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful runs through December 14 at the Park Avenue Armory.
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