\n<\/p>\n
\u201cThis isn\u2019t fun.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what the choreographer Jamar Roberts told members of the Martha Graham Dance Company at a recent rehearsal of \u201cWe the People,\u201d his first work for the troupe.<\/p>\n
The anti-fun note was needed because the music suggested otherwise. \u201cWe the People\u201d is set to rearranged songs from \u201cYou\u2019re the One,\u201d the latest and most playful album by the singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens<\/a>. It\u2019s rocking-chair porch music or accompaniment for a foot-stomping hoedown.<\/p>\n But Roberts\u2019s dance, which will have its New York premiere on April 17 as part of the Graham company\u2019s season at New York City Center<\/a>, isn\u2019t a hoedown. It\u2019s a protest, dressed in denim. (The costumes are by Karen Young.) For much of the work, the dancers face the audience confrontationally, fists raised. They move fast and hard \u2014 as if \u201cyelling at people,\u201d as Roberts put it in an interview after the rehearsal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In one sense, this attitude rubs against the tone and associations of the music. In another, that friction, like a bow across strings, brings out the pain, rage and resistance hidden within the sound. You might even say it brings to the surface what Alvin Ailey \u2014 in whose company Roberts was a dancer for nearly 20 years and resident choreographer from 2019 to 2022 \u2014 called \u201cblood memories.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n An outcome of Roberts\u2019s artistic proclivities, this resurfacing is also, in an indirect way, what Janet Eilber, the Graham company\u2019s artistic director, had in mind. She said that the plan to pair Roberts with Giddens arose out of a possible revival of \u201cRodeo,\u201d a 1942 cowboy ballet by Agnes de Mille, a pathbreaking choreographer who was also a Graham acolyte and biographer. It includes tap and square dancing.<\/p>\n \u201cWe wanted to open the conversation about how the American vernacular dance in \u2018Rodeo\u2019 emerged out of immigrant and slave communities,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Someone directed Eilber to Giddens, whose career has been largely devoted to uncovering and reclaiming the cross-cultural, Black-and-white roots of string band music and the Black history of the banjo. While pursuing that mission, she has earned a MacArthur fellowship, Grammy awards and a Pulitzer Prize (with Michael Abels for their opera, \u201cOmar\u201d<\/a>). Recently the mission got a Beyonc\u00e9 bump, through Giddens\u2019s contributions to the pop star\u2019s \u201cCowboy Carter\u201d album, which has raised discussions about the Blackness of country music.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Asked to reimagine Aaron Copland\u2019s genre-defining score for \u201cRodeo,\u201d Giddens suggested Gabe Witcher of the Punch Brothers instead. At City Center, his bluegrass band will play his rearrangement. Wanting a companion piece for this version, Eilber asked Roberts to use Giddens\u2019s music, similarly rearranged by Witcher, to make a work that would offer a more expansive and inclusive vision of America. The City Center season, which combines \u201cRodeo\u201d and \u201cWe the People\u201d \u2014 and starts the company\u2019s centennial celebrations two years early \u2014 is called \u201cAmerican Legacies.\u201d<\/p>\n Although he is a longtime fan of Giddens\u2019s music, Roberts said he had difficulty finding his way in. He kept getting caught up in the stories told in her lyrics, which are stripped away in Witcher\u2019s all-instrumental arrangement. \u201cThe songs for me were really light,\u201d he said. \u201cI was trying to think of way to bring them down a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n He came up with silent interludes. In the first, Leslie Andrea Williams alternates between lifting her chest so high that she might lift off and doubling over, deflating like a leaky balloon. In another, a phalanx of female dancers juts and stomps aggressively. In a third, Lloyd Knight stretches into a Black Power salute and curls into a ball. He sinks to the ground hinged at his knees, then lies prone with his hands behind his back, ready for handcuffs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not that I\u2019m against fun pieces,\u201d Roberts said. \u201cBut America is having a hard time right now. As a Black gay man from a Southern Black family, it\u2019s been really hard, for me and people like me, but so many stories besides my own became of great importance in the piece.\u201d<\/p>\n Giddens said in a phone interview that she was amazed by the results: \u201cIt is really saying so many of the things I wanted to say without even knowing that I wanted to say them.\u201d \u201cAnother Wasted Life<\/a>,\u201d a song that Giddens wrote about Kalief Browder,<\/a> who committed suicide after being imprisoned for three years without a trial, isn\u2019t in \u201cWe the People,\u201d but she feels the ghost of it in the dance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI tend to downplay my banjo tunes,\u201d she said. \u201cBut there\u2019s actually a lot in them. My sound on the 1850 replica minstrel banjo that I play is centered in pain as well as joy. There\u2019s a story in the music, and Gabe and Jamar found it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cRhiannon and I do the same kind of work,\u201d Roberts said. \u201cThis excavation, making old things new, bringing hidden stories to light. We\u2019re in the same tribe.\u201d<\/p>\n Such excavation is in the Graham tradition, too, as Roberts knows. Although he comes from outside the Graham company, he was trained in her technique. One of his most important teachers was Peter London, who was a principal dancer with the Graham troupe. Roberts said that he sees himself more as a modern-dance choreographer, in the line of a Graham, than as a contemporary one following more recent trends.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Graham vocabulary has always been in my body,\u201d he said, \u201cand it\u2019s always been in my work.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe the People\u201d includes flashes of American vernacular dance, twisty footwork suitable for a barn dance, but as in Graham\u2019s \u201cAppalachian Spring,\u201d these touches are transformed by a modern-dance approach. Contraction and release, the core of Graham technique, which she called a dramatization of breathing, is constitutional in \u201cWe the People.\u201d At that recent rehearsal, though, it sometimes seemed as if Roberts had to teach the Graham dancers how to move with the right full-body attack.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re so steeped in that tradition,\u201d he said, \u201cthat when I come in and ask them to do something a little different\u201d \u2014 alongside Graham-based movement, taken out of a Graham context \u2014 \u201cit feels like their bodies get confused. We\u2019re working on that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Roberts said that being a freelance choreographer \u2014 lately, he\u2019s made work for the likes of New York City Ballet and San Francisco Ballet \u2014 can make him feel \u201cungrounded,\u201d lacking a familiar language between himself and the dancers he\u2019s hired to work with.<\/p>\n But he isn\u2019t so far outside the Graham company. Knight is one of his best friends; they trained at the same Miami school as teenagers. And Alessio Crognale-Roberts, who does a solo during one of the silent interludes, is married to Roberts. (\u201cI couldn\u2019t not give him a solo,\u201d Roberts said.)<\/p>\n \u201cHe represents the L.G.B.T.Q. community,\u201d Roberts said of his husband\u2019s role. \u201cThere is this struggle in his body between being liberated and having to conform.\u201d Crognale-Roberts is also an immigrant from Italy, \u201chustling, trying to fulfill his dreams,\u201d Roberts said. That\u2019s in the solo, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Williams and Knight, the other two soloists, are Black. Dancers in the Graham company are often typecast, Williams said, with Black dancers playing the powerful or sexy roles or maybe the mother figure. \u201cI felt like he knew me,\u201d she said of Roberts. \u201cIt felt so special to have someone see me for me, instead of fitting me into an archetype.\u201d<\/p>\n Until recently, Black choreographers working for Graham have been scarce. One of the only requests that Giddens made of Roberts, he said, was that he center Black dancers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like, What is the purpose?\u201d she said in her interview. \u201cWhat kind of shock waves can this send out after it\u2019s over? We\u2019re trying to create systemic change, and if there\u2019s an opportunity to foreground Black artists, we should take it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean that it has to be a quote-unquote Black story,\u201d she continued. \u201cActually, it\u2019s better if it\u2019s not.\u201d What she liked about seeing Williams and Knight featured in \u201cWe the People,\u201d she said, was that it just felt normal.<\/p>\n Noting that there has been a lot of performative diversity and inclusion lately, Giddens gave the Graham company credit for hiring artists, giving them support and staying out of their way.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are trying to mend ways that have been set in stone for a long time,\u201d she said, calling for grace. \u201cJamar and I wanted to use this opportunity to make something that answers something in us, and we did.\u201d<\/p>\n For Roberts the protest stance is a new direction, and it makes him nervous. \u201cIt\u2019s so simple that it feels a little cringe,\u201d he said. But he also thinks it might be potent. \u201cIt\u2019s the start of a conversation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n