“This is not fun.”
That’s what choreographer Jamar Roberts told members of the Martha Graham Dance Company at a recent rehearsal of “We the People,” his first work for the company.
The anti-fun note was needed because the music suggested otherwise. “We the People” is set to remix songs from “You’re the One”, the latest and most playful album from singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens. It’s rocking chair porch music or foot stomping accompaniment.
But Roberts’ dance, which will premiere in New York on April 17 of the Graham Company’s season in downtown New York, it’s not a hobby. It’s a protest, dressed in jeans. (Costumes are by Karen Young.) For much of the work, the dancers face the audience confrontationally, fists raised. They move fast and hard—like “yelling at people,” as Roberts put it in a post-rehearsal interview.
In a sense, this attitude rubs off on the tone and connotations of the music. In another, this friction, like a bow on the strings, brings out the pain, rage and resistance hidden within the sound. You could say it brings to the surface what Alvin Ailey — in whose company Roberts was a dancer for nearly 20 years and resident choreographer from 2019 to 2022 — called “blood memories.”
A product of Roberts’ artistic impulses, this re-emergence is also, in an indirect way, what Janet Eilber, the Graham Company’s art director, had in mind. He said the plan to pair Roberts with Giddens arose out of a possible revival of “Rodeo,” a 1942 cowboy ballet by Agnes de Mille, a pioneering choreographer who was also Graham’s student and biographer. Includes tap and square dancing.
“We wanted to open up the conversation about how American traditional dance in ‘Rodeo’ emerged from immigrant and slave communities,” he said.
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 banjo’s black history. In pursuit of this mission, he won a MacArthur Fellowship, Grammy Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize (with Michael Abels for their opera, “Omar”). Recently, the mission marked Beyoncé, through Giddens’ contributions to the pop star’s album “Cowboy Carter,” which has raised debates about the Blackness of country music.
Giddens, when asked to reprise Aaron Copland’s genre-defining score for “Rodeo,” suggested Gabe Witcher of the Punch Brothers. At City Center, his bluegrass band will play his rearrangement. Wanting a companion piece for this release, Eilber asked Roberts to use Giddens’ music, similarly reworked by Witcher, to make a work that would offer a more expansive and comprehensive vision of America. City Center’s season, which combines “Rodeo” and “We the People” — and kicks off the company’s centennial celebrations two years early — is called “American Legacies.”
Although a longtime fan of Giddens’ music, Roberts said he had a hard time finding his way. He continued to be captivated by the stories told in her lyrics, which have been stripped down to Witcher’s all-instrumental arrangement. “The songs for me were very light,” he said. “I was trying to think of a way to bring them down a bit.”
He thought with silent interludes. In the first, Leslie Andrea Williams alternates between lifting her chest so high she can stand up and doubling over, deflating like a leaking balloon. In another, a phalanx of female dancers protrudes and stomps aggressively. In a third, Lloyd Knight stretches out in a Black Power salute and curls into a ball. He sinks to the ground on his knees, then lies with his hands behind his back, ready for handcuffs.
“It’s not that I’m against the fun bits,” Roberts said. “But America is having a hard time right now. As a black gay man from a Southern Black family, it was very difficult, for me and people like me, but so many stories besides mine became very important in the piece.”
Giddens said in a phone interview that she was surprised by the results: “I’m really saying so much of what I wanted to say without even knowing I wanted to say it.” “Another life lost,” a song Giddens wrote about Kalief Browder, who killed herself after being imprisoned for three years without a trial, is not on “We the People,” but she feels its ghost in the dance.
“I tend to downplay my banjo tunes,” he said. “But actually there’s a lot in them. My sound on the 1850’s replica minstrel banjo I play is focused 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 makes old things new, brings hidden stories to light. We are of the same race.”
Such an excavation is also in the Graham tradition, as Roberts knows. Although he comes from outside the Graham company, he was trained in its technique. One of his most important teachers was Peter London, who was a principal dancer in the Graham troupe. Roberts said he sees himself more as a modern dance choreographer, along the lines of a Graham, than as a contemporary following the latest trends.
“Graham’s vocabulary was always in my body,” he said, “and it was always in my work.”
“We the People” includes flashes of American folk dance, twisting stomps fit for a barn dance, but as with Graham’s “Appalachian Spring,” these touches are transformed by a modern dance approach. Contraction and release, the core of Graham’s technique, which he called breath dramatization, is constitutional in We the People. In that recent rehearsal, however, it sometimes seemed like Roberts had to teach Graham’s dancers how to move with the proper full-body attack.
“They’re so steeped in that tradition,” he said, “that when I come in and ask them to do something a little different” — paralleling the Graham-based movement, pulled from a Graham framework — “I feel like their body gets confused. We are working on it.”
Roberts said that being a freelance choreographer—lately, he has worked for ballets such as the New York City Ballet and the San Francisco Ballet—can make him feel “ungrounded,” without a familiar language between himself and the dancers he has been hired to work with.
But it’s not that far from the Graham company. Knight is one of his best friends. they attended the same Miami school as teenagers. And Alessio Crognale-Roberts, who solos in one of the silent interludes, is married to Roberts. (“I couldn’t help but give him a solo,” Roberts said.)
“He represents the LGBTQ community,” Roberts said of his husband’s role. “There’s this battle in his body between breaking free and conforming.” Crognale-Roberts is also an immigrant from Italy, “broken, trying to fulfill his dreams,” Roberts said. This is 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 the strong 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 fitting me into an archetype.”
Until recently, Black choreographers working for Graham were rare. One of the only requests Giddens made of Roberts, he said, was to center the black dancers.
“It’s like, what’s the point?” she said in her interview. “What kind of shockwaves can this send out after it’s over? We’re trying to create systemic change, and if there’s an opportunity to bring black artists to the fore, we should take it.”
“That doesn’t mean it has to be a black story without quotes,” he continued. “Actually, it’s better if it isn’t.” What she liked about watching Williams and Knight appear on “We the People,” she said, was that it felt normal.
Noting that there’s been a lot of interpretive diversity and inclusion lately, Giddens credited Graham’s company with recruiting artists, supporting them, and avoiding them.
“People are trying to fix ways that have been ingrained for a long time,” he said, calling for grace. “Jamar and I wanted to take this opportunity to make something that answered something inside of us, and we did.”
For Roberts, the protest stance is a new direction, and it makes him nervous. “It’s so simple that it feels a bit clunky,” he said. But he also believes it can be powerful. “It’s the start of a conversation,” he said.