One of the best-known facts about Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor is that the composer died before it was completed. Over the centuries, completion has occurred. The music for Kyle Abraham’s dance “Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth” isn’t one of those.
Snatches of Mozart’s Requiem will be heard throughout the production when it premieres in New York Thursday at the Rose Theater and Abraham’s wonderful company AIM presents it as part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City series. .but innovative Electronic Music Producer Jlin is responsible for the music, often remixing it beyond recognition.
It’s not as easy (or fun) as putting a groove under Mozart, like a disco remake of Beethoven’s Fifth. On occasion, Jlin lends his Requiem a deep, underground, theatrical bass. More often she chops it up and shifts to stutter or reverse. In long sections, Mozart completely retreats and is replaced by Jlin’s own wonderfully polyrhythmic percussive imagination.
Abraham’s work also does not look like a traditional Requiem. Dan Scully’s lighting and scenery design is futuristic chic, an ever-changing light show of neon bars and illuminated circles. Now red, now turquoise, now Easter his purple. An oculus high on the back wall oozes and bubbles with lava lamps.
The costume by Giles Deacon is a silky white smock shirt suit with frills and ruffles. wears poufs and protrusions somewhat reminiscent of those designed in Merce Cunningham’s Scenario. Their faces, which are difficult to see in dim light, have a lot of masking colors around their eyes.
Deacon also designed the costumes for Abraham’s 2018 New York City Ballet hit, The Runaway. Like “The Runaway,” and unlike Abraham’s recent intimate, sitcom-like “Love Without a Title,” this “Requiem” is conceived on the scale of a grand opera house, with ballet and ballet. seems to be struggling and enjoying the crossover between…and socializing.
In this sense, Abraham is very similar to Mozart and Zillin. The tension in Abraham’s style — between fluidity and sharpness, arcs and glitches, lines and breaks — is productively heightened by the score. This piece is an exciting feat of group, duo and solo sections, shot through with beautiful skeins of movement and rave reviews.A new dancer in addition to the company’s usual wizards Daimon Samara Stand out.
But Jilin doesn’t give Abraham much help with consistency and structure. From start to finish, the dancers frequently fall, cramp, and jump to their feet, making the sequence contagious, but the repetition lacks meaning and emotional resonance. Hmm. Cast members catch and hug each other and dance for each other in the center of the circle. Usually supportive, but once it becomes stylized combat. At another point, they mock their politeness, clapping sarcastically, and alluding to their attitude towards performance. (Here Jlin samples an evil laugh.) But the attitudes and perspectives are generally mushy and tortuous.
Is Abraham’s “Requiem” really a requiem? It is more melancholy than sad, without the daily religious horrors of anger or equal stakes. It was not a “confutatis” driven by
If it’s not Requiem, what is it? When a wing dancer reaches out to her colleague on stage, it can be read as a beckoning from the other side… or from the future? Near the end, as Jlin plays a bit of Mozart as it echoes through space, images of the birth are projected onto the Oculus like visions out of a porthole. But this “Requiem” is not as lucid as his sci-fi. The spaceship is stylish, but without fire this time.
“Requiem: Fire of the Earth’s Air”
through Saturday at the Rose Theater. lincolncenter.org.
