NEW YORK, NY.- This isnt fun.
Thats what choreographer Jamar Roberts told members of the Martha Graham Dance Company at a recent rehearsal of We the People, his first work for the troupe.
The antifun note was needed because the music suggested otherwise. We the People is set to rearranged songs from Youre the One, the latest and most playful album by singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens. Its rocking-chair porch music or accompaniment for a foot-stomping hoedown.
But Roberts dance, which will have its New York premiere April 17 as part of the Graham companys season at New York City Center, isnt a hoedown. Its a protest, dressed in denim. (The costumes are by Karen Young.) For much of the work, the dancers face the audience confrontationally, fists raised. They move fast and hard as if yelling at people, as Roberts put it in an interview after the rehearsal.
In one sense, this attitude rubs against the tone and associations of the music. In another, that friction, like a bow across strings, brings out the pain, rage and resistance hidden within the sound. You might even say it brings to the surface what Alvin Ailey in whose company Roberts was a dancer for nearly 20 years and resident choreographer from 2019 to 2022 called blood memories.
An outcome of Roberts artistic proclivities, this resurfacing is also, in an indirect way, what Janet Eilber, the Graham companys artistic director, had in mind. She said that the plan to pair Roberts with Giddens arose out of a possible revival of Rodeo, a 1942 cowboy ballet by Agnes de Mille, a pathbreaking choreographer who was also a Graham acolyte and biographer. It includes tap and square dancing.
We wanted to open the conversation about how the American vernacular dance in Rodeo emerged out of immigrant and enslaved communities, she said.
Someone directed Eilber to Giddens, whose career has been largely devoted to uncovering and reclaiming the cross-cultural, Black-and-white roots of string band music and the Black history of the banjo. While pursuing that mission, she has earned a MacArthur fellowship, Grammy awards and a Pulitzer Prize (with Michael Abels for their opera, Omar). Recently the mission got a Beyoncé bump, through Giddens contributions to the pop stars Cowboy Carter album, which has raised discussions about the Blackness of country music.
Asked to reimagine Aaron Coplands genre-defining score for Rodeo, Giddens suggested Gabe Witcher of the Punch Brothers instead. At City Center, his bluegrass band will play his rearrangement. Wanting a companion piece for this version, Eilber asked Roberts to use Giddens music, similarly rearranged by Witcher, to make a work that would offer a more expansive and inclusive vision of America. The City Center season, which combines Rodeo and We the People and starts the companys centennial celebrations two years early is called American Legacies.
Although he is a longtime fan of Giddens music, Roberts said he had difficulty finding his way in. He kept getting caught up in the stories told in her lyrics, which are stripped away in Witchers all-instrumental arrangement. The songs for me were really light, he said. I was trying to think of way to bring them down a little bit.
He came up with silent interludes. In the first, Leslie Andrea Williams alternates between lifting her chest so high that she might lift off and doubling over, deflating like a leaky balloon. In another, a phalanx of female dancers juts and stomps aggressively. In a third, Lloyd Knight stretches into a Black Power salute and curls into a ball. He sinks to the ground hinged at his knees, then lies prone with his hands behind his back, ready for handcuffs.
Its not that Im against fun pieces, Roberts said. But America is having a hard time right now. As a Black gay man from a Southern Black family, its been really hard, for me and people like me, but so many stories besides my own became of great importance in the piece.
Giddens said in a phone interview that she was amazed by the results: It is really saying so many of the things I wanted to say without even knowing that I wanted to say them. Another Wasted Life, a song that Giddens wrote about Kalief Browder, who committed suicide after being imprisoned for three years without a trial, isnt in We the People, but she feels the ghost of it in the dance.
I tend to downplay my banjo tunes, she said. But theres actually a lot in them. My sound on the 1850 replica minstrel banjo that I play is centered in pain as well as joy. Theres a story in the music, and Gabe and Jamar found it.
Rhiannon and I do the same kind of work, Roberts said. This excavation, making old things new, bringing hidden stories to light. Were in the same tribe.
Such excavation is in the Graham tradition, too, as Roberts knows. Although he comes from outside the Graham company, he was trained in her technique. One of his most important teachers was Peter London, who was a principal dancer with the Graham troupe. Roberts said that he sees himself more as a modern-dance choreographer, in the line of a Graham, than as a contemporary one following more recent trends.
The Graham vocabulary has always been in my body, he said, and its always been in my work.
We the People includes flashes of American vernacular dance, twisty footwork suitable for a barn dance, but as in Grahams Appalachian Spring, these touches are transformed by a modern-dance approach. Contraction and release, the core of Graham technique, which she called a dramatization of breathing, is constitutional in We the People. At that recent rehearsal, though, it sometimes seemed as if Roberts had to teach the Graham dancers how to move with the right full-body attack.
Theyre so steeped in that tradition, he said, that when I come in and ask them to do something a little different alongside Graham-based movement, taken out of a Graham context it feels like their bodies get confused. Were working on that.
Roberts said that being a freelance choreographer lately, hes made work for the likes of New York City Ballet and San Francisco Ballet can make him feel ungrounded, lacking a familiar language between himself and the dancers hes hired to work with.
But he isnt so far outside the Graham company. Knight is one of his best friends; they trained at the same Miami school as teenagers. And Alessio Crognale-Roberts, who does a solo during one of the silent interludes, is married to Roberts. (I couldnt not give him a solo, Roberts said.)
He represents the LGBTQ community, Roberts said of his husbands role. There is this struggle in his body between being liberated and having to conform. Crognale-Roberts is also an immigrant from Italy, hustling, trying to fulfill his dreams, Roberts said. Thats in the solo, too.
Williams and Knight, the other two soloists, are Black. Dancers in the Graham company are often typecast, Williams said, with Black dancers playing the powerful or sexy roles or maybe the mother figure. I felt like he knew me, she said of Roberts. It felt so special to have someone see me for me, instead of fitting me into an archetype.
Until recently, Black choreographers working for Graham have been scarce. One of the only requests that Giddens made of Roberts, he said, was that he center Black dancers.
Its like, What is the purpose? she said in her interview. What kind of shock waves can this send out after its over? Were trying to create systemic change, and if theres an opportunity to foreground Black artists, we should take it.
That doesnt mean that it has to be a quote-unquote Black story, she continued. Actually, its better if its not. What she liked about seeing Williams and Knight featured in We the People, she said, was that it just felt normal.
Noting that there has been a lot of performative diversity and inclusion lately, Giddens gave the Graham company credit for hiring artists, giving them support and staying out of their way.
People are trying to mend ways that have been set in stone for a long time, she said, calling for grace. Jamar and I wanted to use this opportunity to make something that answers something in us, and we did.
For Roberts the protest stance is a new direction, and it makes him nervous. Its so simple that it feels a little cringe, he said. But he also thinks it might be potent. Its the start of a conversation, he said.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.