For those of a certain age, it’s easy to feel wistful about mix tapes. In the days of the cassette, to make a mix tape for someone else was a daring act of exposure: an expression of your taste and allegiances with otherwise unspeakable messages encoded in the titles and lyrics of the songs you chose to fill the limited space.
Kyle Abraham’s “Cassette Vol. 1” is a mix tape dance. The soundtrack of the work — which Abraham’s company, A.I.M, gave its New York debut at N.Y.U. Skirball on Thursday — is a selection of 1980s pop songs that Abraham, in a program note, says he listened to in the back of the school bus in his elementary and middle school years. Push play on nostalgia.
That’s the tone even before the music starts. Dan Scully’s design suggests the décor of an ’80s-themed restaurant: a pay phone, mall-store mannequins and vintage TVs that broadcast period images (Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, “E.T.” and “Flashdance”) and, during one interlude, period commercials (“Calgon, take me away!”). The dancers wear track suits and big wigs of permed hair.
There’s even a flimsy frame narrative out of a 1980s music video. The dancer William Okajima has a crush on Gianna Theodore and wants to give her a mix tape, but he keeps getting thwarted. Near the end of the show, he conveniently backs into her, places his Walkman headphones over her ears and reveals his feelings with a pop song.
But Abraham wants to express other sides of himself too, like his influences in American postmodern dance. So R.E.M.’s “The One I Love” is matched with the freely swinging angles of Trisha Brown, the dancers lining up or arcing in and out of the wings in backward jogging. The B-52’s “Rock Lobster” occasions sampling from the dispassionate pedestrianism of Yvonne Rainer’s “Trio A.”
These stylistic contrasts produce a little tension and a little less release. The dancers avoid walking like an Egyptian to “Walk Like an Egyptian.” They resist jumping to the Pointer Sisters’ “Jump,” but give in once on a late chorus. They can’t help but react to Prince with a touch of sass, and here and there, they stud their balletic extensions and balances with a shivering shimmy or booty-slap synchronized with a drum hit.
It’s frustrating to watch such terrific dancers move with exquisite poise and evened-out pacing to music that calls for more idiomatic motion and a tight connection to the beat. A section set to tape hiss provides some relief, a chance to appreciate the beauty of Abraham’s abstractions and the meaning of mirroring without the pop overlay.
The most fun bits involve the guest artist Taylor Stanley, a principal dancer with New York City Ballet and star of “The Runaway,” Abraham’s breakout work for that company. Against the wig-fluffing wind of a standing fan, Stanley preens in perfect slow motion to Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself,” indulging in the kind of period moves abstained from elsewhere: the Cabbage Patch, New Wave arm swinging, body rolls with finger guns firing.
That’s not the only humor. Where “Trio A” was originally accompanied by wooden slats dropped from a balcony, here Koosh balls and stuffed animals fly in from the wings until the stage resembles the bottom of a claw machine. The mild silliness is followed by the major sentimentality of the ending.
The song that Okajima plays for Theodore is none other than Extreme’s “More Than Words.” As the pair listens to the hard rock band’s acoustic, close-harmony ballad, Alysia Johnson and Destin Morisset dance a distanced, angular duet like one Bill T. Jones might have made in the ’80s. The words of the song and the more than words of the dance clash as the ballad’s sappiness gradually seeps in. “Hold me close/Don’t ever let me go.” The ’80s kid in me was touched.
“Cassette Vol. 1” is far from daring, but through it Abraham presents himself as a child of 1980s pop steeped in postmodern dance, serious and silly and sentimental. We get the message.
A.I.M by Kyle Abraham
Through Saturday at N.Y.U. Skirball; nyuskirball.org.
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