The choreographer Kyle Abraham is full of anxiety and fear, he has said, feelings that have landed him in a place of fragility. While this hardly sets him apart in this day and age, his latest work, “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,” attempts to thread those feelings into a dance. Abraham, a MacArthur Fellow, is capable of much, but this would be hard for anyone to pull off.
The dance opens with Abraham in a running solo, winding around the stage in counterclockwise circles. His expression holds the happy verve of a young man caught somewhere between boyhood and adolescence. His arms are stretched nearly straight. He smiles with guileless innocence.
But soon his sprint slows and his legs start to lope as his arms swing with less force. He teeters here and there, his forward motion cut short by spins that twist his solitary form before it rights itself again. His chin dips, his spine curves and his steps turn into more of a shuffle as he inches toward the edge of the stage. After one last look — a lingering, stilted pause — he leaves.
That stilted sensation comes up more than once in this well-meaning but often lackluster dance. “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,” which premiered at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday, explores ideas about solitude and isolation: Is there the possibility of change in a world steeped with sorrow? Yet just as the world seems stuck, so does this dance, which gets lost in a loop with more choreographic recycling than renewal.
While there are hints at desolation — at times the dancers wilt to the floor where they remain for varying times, curled on their sides — what predominates is the kind of sadness that flattens you out, the kind that can go on for ages before you decide to do anything about it.
A commissioned score, performed live by the six-member chamber ensemble yMusic, amounted to a generic mishmash of strings, horns and the occasional voice. The video projection design was by the new media artist Cao Yuxi, also known as JAMES.
From the start, there was a verdant forest feel to the projections, which had a way of swallowing up dancers to show, perhaps, the smallness of a human being in contrast to the natural world. Leaves were blowing softly as colors shifted from greens to yellows and violets. But as time went on, the projections turned the stage into something like a screen saver — larger than life, yet still a screen saver.
“Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful” was set on a custom-made stage that shrunk the normally cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall into a fairly typical proscenium arrangement. As a choreographic canvas meant to show loneliness brought on by isolation, the stage seemed too small. Solos and duets needed more negative space, more breathing room to achieve poignancy and emotional resonance.
Too often, sentimentality took over, as when a pair of dancers hugged and others slowly surrounded them to rest a hand on their backs — a huddle of compassion. While the dancers — from Abraham’s company, A.I.M, along with some guests — were clearly accomplished, their movement patterns, however sleek, could drag down time.
Arms, raised parallel like railroad tracks, dropped down to stir invisible pots. A leg swung to the side while the spine swooped downward in a flourish of momentum. Packs of dancers rushed across the stage like flocks of birds or swarms of bees in what seemed another nod to the natural world. But as movement patterns, these never grew in emotional value; they were simply on repeat.
In many moments, the choreography was more sequential than surprising, and the echoes of Trisha Brown, the great postmodern choreographer, were hard to ignore, from the dancers’ loose-limbed movement to the symmetry of their bodies as they mirrored one another’s formations across the stage. Karen Young’s wide, silky pants and airy tops gave pools of light a watery feel, but for all their flow, they, too, seemed derivative, again, of Brown’s era. What’s odd is this dance was about the 21st century, but it didn’t have a 21st century identity.
In the end, the projections disappeared and the space went white. As Abraham, performing in his first ensemble work in years, radiated a singular vulnerability — and maybe even a sense of hope — his body, at 47 more lived in now, held the stage with a mature, grounded grandeur. As a spotlight grew dim, he walked so slowly that he almost seemed to float. His shoulders briefly quivered, but he pressed on until blackout washed him away. It was a moment of alertness, a meditation to end on, and Abraham, here, was made beautiful.
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