Cassette vol. 1 A.I.M by Kyle Abraham

Is nostalgia not perhaps the mental sweater that wraps around the memories dancing in our minds?

Over the years, I have created works that recall the intersection between classical music and the birth of hip hop in my life, but the voices of ’80s and ’90s pop and New Wave have deeply intertwined with my interests and experiences. I wanted to create a work that paid tribute to another side of my influences, highlighting a very particular aspect of what it meant to dance on the back of the yellow and black school buses of my elementary and middle school years, to music made equally by M/A/R/R/S, Suzanne Vega, Salt-N-Pepa, The B-52’s, LL Cool J, and Prince. With the rise of music video culture in the early ’80s, a surge of imagination, street culture, and popular hybridization of forms seemed to point toward the future. That hybridization speaks to the desire to merge different movement vocabularies, incorporating ballet technique and a strong influence of “release-based” quality for this new work, titled Cassette Vol. 1.

Although not limited exclusively to release-based practice, the influences of Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, Kevin Wynn—among many others—emerge throughout the process of this creation. The movement vocabularies used aim to honor a choreographic lineage that may not be evident to everyone, while highlighting the non-monolithic nature of Black experience and cultural reception within American culture. Cassette Vol. 1 is both exaggeration and critique. At its core, it seeks to create a space for the ridiculous and the referential. There is room to laugh at excesses and to be moved by the subtle humanity of lost memories. (Kyle Abraham)