“It’s not fun.”
That’s what choreographer Jamar Roberts told members of the Martha Graham Dance Company during a recent rehearsal of “We the People,” his first work for the troupe.
The anti-fun note was necessary because the music suggested otherwise. “We the People” is set to rearranged songs from “You’re the One,” the latest and most playful album from singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens. It’s rocking-chair porch music or accompaniment for a foot-stomping hoedown.
But Roberts’ dance, which will have its New York premiere on April 17 as a part of the Graham company’s time in New York City Center, is not a hoedown. It was a protest, wearing jeans. (The costumes are by Karen Young.) For most of the work, the dancers face the audience confrontationally, fist raised. They move fast and hard — like “yelling at people,” as Roberts put it in a post-rehearsal interview.
In a sense, this attitude contradicts the tone and associations of the music. In another, that friction, like a bow on strings, brings out the pain, anger and resistance hidden within the sound. You might even say it brings out what Alvin Ailey — in whose company Roberts was a dancer for nearly 20 years and resident choreographer from 2019 to 2022 — calls “blood memories.”
An outcome of Roberts’ artistic proclivities, this re-emergence is also, indirectly, what Janet Eilber, artistic director of the Graham company, had in mind. He said the plan to pair Roberts with Giddens came from a possible revival of “Rodeo,” 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.
“We want to open up the conversation about how American vernacular dance in ‘Rodeo’ came out of immigrant and slave communities,” he said.
Someone directed Eilber to Giddens, whose career has largely focused on 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, he earned a MacArthur fellowship, Grammy awards and a Pulitzer Prize (with Michael Abels for their opera, “Omar”). Beyoncé’s mission recently got a bump, with Giddens’ contributions to the pop star’s “Cowboy Carter” album, fueling discussions about country music’s Blackness.
Asked to reimagine Aaron Copland’s genre-defining score for “Rodeo,” Giddens instead suggested Punch Brothers’ Gabe Witcher. At City Center, his bluegrass band will play his rearrangement. Wanting a companion piece for this version, Eilber asked Roberts to use Giddens’ music, similarly rearranged by Witcher, to create a work that would offer a broader and more inclusive view of America. City Center’s season, which combines “Rodeo” and “We the People” — and kicked off the company’s centennial celebration two years earlier — is called “American Legacies.”
Although she’s been a longtime fan of Giddens’ music, Roberts says she struggled to find her way. He continues to get caught up in the stories told in his lyrics, which are removed from Witcher’s all-instrumental arrangement. “The songs for me are really light,” he says. “I tried to think of a way to bring them down a little bit.”
He comes in quiet interludes. At first, Leslie Andrea Williams alternates between lifting her chest as high as she can lift and doubling over, like a deflating balloon. In another, a phalanx of female dancers aggressively juts and stomps. In a third, Lloyd Knight stretches out in a Black Power salute and curls into a ball. He sinks to the ground hanging on his knees, then lies flat with his hands behind his back, ready for handcuffs.
“It’s not that I’m against fun pieces,” Roberts said. “But America is struggling now. As a Black gay man from a Southern Black family, it was really hard, for me and people like me, but there were so many stories besides my own that made the piece so important.”
Giddens said in a phone interview that he was amazed by the results: “It really says so many things that I wanted to say without even knowing I wanted to say them.” “Another Wasted Life,” a song Giddens wrote about Kalief Browder, who killed himself after being imprisoned for three years without trial, is not on “We the People,” but he feels its ghost in the dance.
“I tend to downplay my banjo tune,” he says. “But there are really many of them. My sound on the 1850 replica minstrel banjo I play centers on pain as well as joy. There’s a story in music, and Gabe and Jamar found it.”
“Rhiannon and I do the same kind of work,” Roberts said. “This excavation, making old things new, bringing hidden stories to light. We are in the same tribe.”
Such excavation is also in the Graham tradition, as Roberts knows. Although he came from outside Graham’s company, he was trained in his method. One of his most important teachers was Peter London, who was a principal dancer in the Graham troupe. Roberts says he sees himself more as a modern-dance choreographer, along the lines of a Graham, than as a contemporary following more recent trends.
“The Graham vocabulary is always in my body,” he says, “and it’s always in my work.”
“We the People” includes flashes of American vernacular dance, twisty footwork suitable for a barn dance, but as in Graham’s “Appalachian Spring,” these touches are transformed by a modern dance approach. Contraction and release, the core of the Graham technique, which he called the dramatization of breathing, is constitutional in “We the People.” However, during that recent rehearsal, Roberts sometimes seemed to have to teach the Graham dancers how to move with proper full-body attack.
“They’re so passionate about that tradition,” he says, “that when I come in and ask them to do something a little different” — with the Graham-based movement, taken from the Graham context — “it’s like their body confused. We do that.”
Roberts says that being a freelance choreographer — most recently, she worked for the likes of New York City Ballet and San Francisco Ballet — can make her feel “ungrounded,” with no familiar language between her and of the dancers he hired to work with.
But he is not yet out of Graham’s company. Knight was one of his best friends; they trained at the same school in Miami as teenagers. And Alessio Crognale-Roberts, who does a solo during one of the quiet interludes, is married to Roberts. (“I couldn’t give him a solo,” Roberts said.)
“She represents the LGBTQ community,” Roberts said of her husband’s role. “There is a struggle in his body between being liberated and having to obey.” Crognale-Roberts is also an immigrant from Italy, “working hard, trying to make his dreams come true,” Roberts said. That’s also in the solo.
Williams and Knight, the other two soloists, are Black. Dancers in Graham’s company are often typecast, Williams said, with Black dancers playing powerful or sexy roles or perhaps the mother figure. “I felt like he knew me,” she said of Roberts. “It felt so special to have someone see me for me, instead of being an archetype.”
Until recently, Black choreographers working for Graham were few and far between. One of the only requests Giddens made of Roberts, she said, was that she center Black dancers.
“Like, What’s the point?” he said in his interview. “What kind of shock wave will it send out after this? We’re trying to create systemic change, and if there’s an opportunity to foreground Black artists, we should take it.”
“That doesn’t mean it has to be a quote-unquote Black story,” he continued. “Actually, it would be better if not.” What he liked about seeing Williams and Knight featured in “We the People,” he said, was that it just felt normal.
Noting that there has been a lot of functional diversity and inclusion lately, Giddens gave Graham’s company credit for hiring artists, giving them support and getting out of their way.
“People are trying to mend ways that have long been set in stone,” he said, calling for grace. “Jamar and I wanted to use this opportunity to do something that resonated with us, and we did.”
For Roberts the protest stance is a new direction, and it makes him nervous. “It’s so simple it’s kind of scary,” he said. But he also thinks it can be powerful. “This is the beginning of a conversation,” he said.
