Celebrating its 65th year, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is appealing to new generations with Kyle Abraham’s “Are You in Your Feelings?” and more.
In December 2022, I brought my teenage son to his first Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performance, which showcased choreographer Kyle Abraham’s
Abraham (a 2013 MacArthur Fellow) founded his own Brooklyn-based dance company, A.I.M, in 2006. Though “Are You in Your Feelings?” debuted at Alvin Ailey last year with raves from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Abraham created an earlier work — A.I.M’s “An Untitled Love,” from 2021 — that sort of speaks in dialogue with the Ailey production: another piece devoted to Black love, but through the exclusive use of D’Angelo songs. But since last year, his newer piece has been connecting with a larger audience at Alvin Ailey while arguably appealing to a younger demographic than usual for the company. It also likely marks an unprecedented instance where profanity needs to be edited out of the music for an Ailey performance.
“I love playing with text in live theater,” Abraham mentions, explaining his choice to have a dancer or two blurt out dialogue during the dance rather than have his movements carry the entire narrative. “In the context of this work — and several others — I think about the ways in which we’re often interrupted by running into friends on the street or listening in on ignorant conversations on the subway while listening to music on headphones or reading a book. Those textual interruptions are doses of reality and levity that make the work or the worlds I’m referencing all the more human.”
This year I shared “Are You in Your Feelings?”, programmed in the middle of “Revelations” and choreographer Amy Hall Garner’s “CENTURY” (a solid piece set to Ailey’s more usual suspects of Ellington, Count Basie and Ray Charles), with my wife. For the first time, she got to see the near-fluorescent costuming of sheer tops and billowy pants; the loving duets between Ashley Kaylynn Green and dancer Chalvar Monteiro; the sad breakup vignette of Ghrai DeVore-Stokes and James Gilmer … all of it. Most movingly of all, I got to hold her hand through the finale, Jhené Aiko singing throughout the hall about following her lover wherever he goes. Go see “Are You in Your Feelings?” with someone you love. The answer to Kyle Abraham’s titular question will feel glaringly obvious.
Miles Marshall Lewis (@MMLunlimited) is an author and Harlem-based cultural critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Rolling Stone and many other outlets. Lewis is currently finishing a cultural biography of comedian Dave Chappelle, his follow-up to Promise That You Will Sing About Me: The Power and Poetry of Kendrick Lamar.
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