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In March of 2022, while rehearsing for the premiere of his new work, The Weathering, choreographer and artistic director of A.I.M. Kyle Abraham shifts the audience into “a whole new atmosphere” as he instructs dancer Natalia Osipova. He choreographs the slightest articulation of movement, from a flick of a wrist to a slight hip torque. It is like he is creating a sculpture. He watches her and instructs her as she moves or stops her to adjust a movement. While observing Osipova on her movements, Abraham’s instructions are not directives, but rather questions and wonderings: “How can we find the upness here?” and “Sometimes I wonder if it's—I don’t think you need much speed to get all of that shifting around.” Poet Lucille Clifton famously said, “I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder.” Indeed, Osipova’s movements shift the atmosphere and we see Abraham’s wonderings come to life. 

Kyle Abraham—2013 MacArthur Fellow, 2018 Princess Grace Statue Award Recipient, 2017-18 Joyce Creative Residency Artist, 2016 Doris Duke Award Recipient and 2015 City Center Choreographer in Residence—received rave reviews for The Weathering. He has been named a choreographer with an acute ability to respond to contemporary times. In 2011 he was named by OUT Magazine as the “best and brightest creative talent to emerge in New York City in the age of Obama.” In 2021 his New York City Ballet work was deemed “among the most beautiful dance films of the pandemic” by The New York Times. 

In 2006, Abraham started A.I.M., a dance company with the mission “to create a body of dance-based work that is galvanized by Black culture and history.” His sensibilities are rooted in and pay homage to lineages of movement with a vocabulary that investigates a humanistic aesthetic. Abraham always acknowledges where his inspiration is derived from, whether that be ballet, hip-hop, or West African movement. His work is in and of the body with not just an awareness of but an affinity for the inner body, what The New York Times referred to as Abraham’s unique talent for “finding the person within the dancer and the bodies within a body.” 

As he choreographs the particular articulations of the most sweeping gestures, Abraham’s movement languages both transform and transcend codified forms of dance, all the while remaining rooted in an ethos of body and history and body and politic. Abraham’s body of work asks his audiences to wonder towards new iterations of desire, culture, and hope, collaboratively showing us what dance makes of us in its wake and world.