“Let’s Begin” (2021) was a tribute to Aviles’ first dance teacher, Jean Churchill. Aviles, performing solo, became the character of a naif, animal-like figure that he played with gentle humor. The piece opened with Aviles wrapped in a tartan plaid length of cloth that we understood represented a trip to the Edinburgh Film Festival. Standing with feet and arms spread in a wide V, he delivered a speech with only his hands: holding up five digits spread apart, and stabbing his opposite index finger to point, as if saying, “you, and you, and you.” Sometimes he was a robot making mechanical motions with funny vocal sounds. Other times, he was monkey-like, exploring the space. Noticing that his boots squeaked on the floor, he grinned at the audience and then exaggerated the sound, while whirling his shirt tails. When he stepped out of the squeaky boots with great show, and then his socks, I realized he was doing a striptease. Again, the nudity. But for a reason—he had come to swim in a body of water. Addressing a black object on the stage as a rock he was climbing, “gently, gently,” he stepped fully onto it and balanced in a luscious swan dive just as the lights went out. 

The final work was Aviles’s original “A Puerto Rican Faggot From America” (1996) which, performed by McKenzie in 2021, became the Bessie Award winning  “A Jamaican Batty Bwoy.” Beginning in silence, McKenzie gave us the full Slow/Flow treatment, moving like taffy, sinuous and loopy, in constant circular motion. As McKenzie spun around their vertical axis, the spiral shape was as if wringing out a washcloth. A couple of times, their arms encircled their head, reminding me of a cat grooming by licking a paw to rub her face. Halfway through, cellist Mel Greenwich took up his place at a music stand onstage and began plucking strings. Delicate and tentative, he tapped the strings with his bow as well as strumming and vocalizing. Minimal, jazzy, sensitive. Another duet, this time between the cello and dancer—a beautiful finish to an evening of duets with artists, past and present, in conversation.