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The baritone saxophone is hulking instrument, a tube of brass so long it extends down past a player\u2019s knees. It makes burly, reedy sounds, deep growls and wails. Kyle Abraham\u2019s new dance \u201c2×4\u201d opens intriguingly with only a baritone saxophonist onstage, honking and stomping. That soloist provides the dance\u2019s music \u2014 until a second baritone saxophonist arrives.<\/p>\n
This unusual musical choice \u2014 Guy Dellecave and Thomas Giles playing two compositions by Shelley Washington \u2014 is also a theatrical one. It helps make \u201c2×4,\u201d Abraham\u2019s sole choreographic contribution to a program of New York premieres, the freshest part of his company\u2019s run at the Joyce Theater this week.<\/p>\n
This \u201c2×4\u201d<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Washington\u2019s first composition strays into folk song territory before downshifting back into a Charles Mingus-like groove. Her double-saxophone duet<\/a> (\u201cBig Talk\u201d) has a rude, ricocheting intensity that she has described as an incensed response to catcalling. Abraham\u2019s dance, characteristically, enacts tender support, the dancers arching over one another elegantly. Like its backdrop \u2014 a Devin B. Johnson painting like a Turner seascape in concrete and rust \u2014 \u201c2×4\u201d is a beautiful abstraction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Coming third on the program, \u201c2×4,\u201d with its friction between Abraham\u2019s and Washington\u2019s sensibilities, provides a needed jolt. The opener, \u201cShell of a Shell of the Shell\u201d 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\u2019s lighting design, subtle for Abraham\u2019s piece, is hyperactive here: silhouetting the performers, repelling them from the exits, implicating the audience. It\u2019s lighting in place of choreographic ideas.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s voice asks, \u201cWhere are we?\u201d The unspoken answer: in a contemporary clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cJust Your Two Wrists,\u201d 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 \u201cSongs of Songs\u201d (recently used by Pam Tanowitz in her \u201cSong of Songs.\u201d)<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n After intermission, Andrea Miller\u2019s \u201cYear\u201d starts off as a promising closer. Fred Despierre\u2019s score has some techno thump, and Miller, creating in collaboration with Abraham\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n Throughout \u201cYear\u201d \u2014 throughout the whole program \u2014 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 Reed is amazing enough to earn applause before the dance is over. Even in \u201cShell,\u201d William Okajima catches the eye and holds it. This is a stellar group in a less-than-stellar program.<\/p>\n A.I.M by Kyle Abraham<\/strong><\/p>\n Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n