A.I.M by Kyle Abraham made their Zellerbach Hall debut with the premiere of 2×4, built around an original score by Shelley Washington. The piece, named for its four dancers and two baritone saxophonists—Guy Dellacave and Thomas Giles—immediately seduced the eye with Devin B. Johnson’s full-stage, painterly orange backdrop and Dan Scully’s atmospheric lighting. Against this burnished field, Dellacave launched into a solo, punctuating phrases by pounding his amped foot for percussion.
Into this charged landscape, four dancers entered, oscillating with and countering the forcefully driven sound. Their luscious movement both softened and sharpened the saxophone’s hard edges—especially when Giles appeared downstage, sparking a bristling musical dialogue with Dellacave upstage.
The score swelled into a skirmish of geese—scabbling, honking, clamoring—while dancers waded through it with street-smart swagger and exuberance, slicing the air with martial-arts-inflected kicks and leaping extensions. Mykiah Goree’s muscular fluidity proved spellbinding, even among this admirable ensemble; his lithe presence rippled across the stage. The company was tight, impeccably matched, equal in caliber.
2×4 ultimately unfolded as a series of conversations—between art and music, sound and movement, costume design (Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung) and scenic design—where angular edges continually met the curvature of mutability.
A recurring throwaway in the choreography—seen throughout the program—was a sassy gestural lexicon reminiscent of the high-energy, stylized femininity that emerged from New York Black and Latino LGBTQ ballroom scene. Tucked within full-bodied movement was a loose wrist, a neck tossed with attitude, a sly sachet of hips. This voguing inflection was sprinkled through rhythmic sequences like deft seasoning—present but never overindulged, a knowing wink rather than a punchline.
The next two dances, If We Were a Song (2021) and The Gettin’ (2014), felt more like jazz concerts—terrific ones—performed by stellar musicians (Liany Mateo, bass; Luther Allison, piano; Otis Brown III, drums) and vocalists (Crystal Monee Hall and Charanee Wade), whose compositions directly inspired the choreography and, at times, intentionally overpowered it.
If We Were a Song, with breathtaking vocals by local Crystal Monee Hall singing Nina Simone classics to stunning effect, set the stage for a series of vignettes—solos and duets constrained by the prevailing melancholic mood and low blue lighting. The choreography seemed light and at times secondary, though tenderly danced with delicate nuance. In “Little Girl Blue,” Suzy Mondesir’s head often met the floor before she gyrated away—only to return—creating a striking cycle of descent and resurgence.
The Gettin’ likewise operated under forces larger than the choreography itself, overlaid with a reimagined score from Max Roach’s 1960 We Insist! – Freedom Now Suite, rooted in the civil rights movement, while the choreography drew inspiration from the South African student uprisings during apartheid. Photographs of “Non-Whites Only” signage in English and Afrikaans were projected across the backdrop, alongside black-and-white newsreel footage—a white reporter covering a story in a Black township, and video of Eric Garner’s 2014 murder by New York City police officers.
Against this charged visual and sonic landscape—jazzy riffs thick with drum rolls, pounding piano, and Charanee Wade’s shattering vocals—the dancers soared, juxtaposing oppression with vibrant camaraderie: hopeful duets, angry solos, and swirling, West Side Story-inflected groupings, dancers clad in vintage 1960s silhouettes. When Wade screamed against the violence, the dancers paused to witness the historic images of brutality and, in doing so, seemed to transcend time—as if bearing witness not only to the past, but to the escalating injustices we continue to confront. Yet for all the weight of these realities and the honesty of their interpretation, the work retained an undercurrent of transcendence: the joy rooted in resilience and confident hope.
David e. Moreno
