The baritone saxophone is hulking instrument, a tube of brass so long it extends down past a player’s knees. It makes burly, reedy sounds, deep growls and wails. Kyle Abraham’s new dance “2×4” opens intriguingly with only a baritone saxophonist onstage, honking and stomping. That soloist provides the dance’s music — until a second baritone saxophonist arrives.
This unusual musical choice — Guy Dellecave and Thomas Giles playing two compositions by Shelley Washington — is also a theatrical one. It helps make “2×4,” Abraham’s sole choreographic contribution to a program of New York premieres, the freshest part of his company’s run at the Joyce Theater this week.
This “2×4” is the opposite of wooden. In addition to the two musicians, there are four dancers (hence the title), whom Abraham often divides into pairs, sometimes with two loosely orbiting the twin-star gravity of the other two. The style is signature Abraham, with sculptural shapes and balletic line offset by soft suggestions of hip-hop and playfully mincing, swishy-armed walks from vogue ballrooms. A tilted balance might be punctuated with sharp air-guitar strumming.
Washington’s first composition strays into folk song territory before downshifting back into a Charles Mingus-like groove. Her double-saxophone duet (“Big Talk”) has a rude, ricocheting intensity that she has described as an incensed response to catcalling. Abraham’s dance, characteristically, enacts tender support, the dancers arching over one another elegantly. Like its backdrop — a Devin B. Johnson painting like a Turner seascape in concrete and rust — “2×4” is a beautiful abstraction.
Coming third on the program, “2×4,” with its friction between Abraham’s and Washington’s sensibilities, provides a needed jolt. The opener, “Shell of a Shell of the Shell” by Rena Butler, a former company member who has become a sought-after choreographer, is not much more than a shell of a dance. Dan Scully’s lighting design, subtle for Abraham’s piece, is hyperactive here: silhouetting the performers, repelling them from the exits, implicating the audience. It’s lighting in place of choreographic ideas.
Or rather in support of a single idea: a hazily sci-fi dystopian atmosphere in which twitchy dancers are isolated in spotlights or illuminated as if in a below-ground cell. Darryl J. Hoffman’s score moves from sounds of children at play, reversed, into booms and monster growls then back into the innocent laughter the right way around. At one point, a woman’s voice asks, “Where are we?” The unspoken answer: in a contemporary cliché.
“Just Your Two Wrists,” a solo choreographed by Paul Singh, is a palette cleanser, short and pretty. The music is a 5-minute excerpt from a David Lang composition based on the “Songs of Songs” (recently used by Pam Tanowitz in her “Song of Songs.”) The soloist unspools a satiny thread of motion periodically broken with stumbles, buckling, collapse. On opening night, Amari Frazier was supple and exact in all the right places.
After intermission, Andrea Miller’s “Year” starts off as a promising closer. Fred Despierre’s score has some techno thump, and Miller, creating in collaboration with Abraham’s dancers, seems to be meeting them on the common ground of the club. Set against white panels and costumed (by Orly Anan Studio) in unitards printed with eyes and red-lipped mouths, the work has an engagingly visceral tribal energy.
That energy dissipates, though, as pretension and sappiness seep in and the sexiness coagulates into pseudo-sexy clumps of writhing bodies. Eventually, two dancers end up on their backs, and one is lifted to spear another as in whaling.
Throughout “Year” — throughout the whole program — the excellence of the dancers shines through. In an opening solo, Faith Joy Mondesire is a marvel of every-which-way bodily control. The company veteran Donovan Reid is so amazing he earns applause before the dance is over. Even in “Shell,” William Okajima catches the eye and holds it. This is a stellar group in a less-than-stellar program.
A.I.M by Kyle Abraham
Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.
