Answering the Calls

One of the first dances I reviewed for Fjord was Jack Ferver’s hilarious yet penetrating “Everything is Imaginable” at New York Live Arts. It featured a series of solos in which accomplished dancers from different genres portrayed their childhood idols. In one vignette, Martha Graham Dance Company principal Lloyd Knight became Martha Graham. Last week at the Guggenheim, the Works &Process Underground Uptown Dance Festival premiered a fleshed-out, hourlong treatment of this concept: “The Drama” by Knight, Ferver, and filmmaker Jeremy Jacob. This time, Knight depicted himself as well as Graham, in a compelling work that told his life’s story through dance, film and the spoken word.

Performance

Lloyd Knight's “The Drama” / “The Night Falls” in excerpt by BalletCollective

Place

Works & Process, The Guggenheim, New York, NY, January 2025

Words

Faye Arthurs

Lloyd Knight in “The Drama.” Photograph by Melissa Sherwood

Back in 2019, I had likened “Everything is Imaginable” to cliff-diving. Fittingly, “The Drama” began with a black and white film of Knight walking on a cliff in a long black gown, echoing a sketch of Graham in her obscure work “Salem Shore.” (This was the first sign that “The Drama” would dig deeper: in “Everything is Imaginable,” Knight had worn a riff on her costume from her more famous “Letter to the World.”) The second shot of the film showed Knight simply standing on the promontory, facing the camera, as the fabric of his dress rippled in the wind to the rumbling piano score. Clearly, he’s learned from Graham that sometimes you need to let a dress speak for itself. But then it was time to speak through movement, and Knight took the stage in the same dress he sported in the film and danced boldly like one of Graham’s many heroines. Throughout this majestic solo, extreme closeups of his face and hands played on the screen behind him. Voiceover clips of Graham informed his repeated corkscrew ronds de jambe and hinges. She spoke of how a dancer is a communicator who must never fail in “either clarity or passion.” Knight did not let her down in those areas.

Just as he had closed his solo in “Imaginable,” Knight exhausted himself through umpteen repeats of a sequence that took him from a proud warrior lunge to a spiral down to the floor. Up and down he went, up and down. He was soaked and panting as he dragged himself face-first along the ground towards the wing (I thought of the inhuman slinking around in the “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” cartoon), where he toweled himself off and grabbed a mic. The fact that he chose to thoroughly wind himself right before his first ever onstage speaking role was telling: this was a work about hard work.

Knight’s section of “Imaginable” was lyrical and serious, though the rest of the piece was laced with biting humor. With Knight’s first words in “The Drama,” he broadcast that he would be very much in on the fun this time around. “I am a dead ass black man,” he emphatically pronounced after scanning the audience slowly. “One who calls himself an artist.” Still huffing a bit, he went on to list his quotidian schedule, “wake up, meditate to center, stretch, eat, go to dance class, seven hrs of rehearsal, find 30 minutes somewhere in there for lunch and catching up on social media, cross train, ice/roll out, dinner, go to bed.” As with the floor drop sequence, he repeated this several times. Finally, he joked: “it’s so serious.” Throughout “The Drama,” he toggled back and forth between solemnity and hilarity, and between the two “queens” who have guided his life: Graham—reintroduced with hysterical “God Save the Queen” pomposity—and his mother, whom he tenderly discussed on film as he flipped through a childhood photo album.

Lloyd Knight in “The Drama.” Photograph by Melissa Sherwood

Really there were three queens, as Knight occasionally referred to himself in the third person as a queen too. Lots of the storytelling in “Drama” was presented in triplicate. In one section, Knight planted himself in a spotlight in between two films of himself lit the same way, and the three of him ran in slomo, goofily evoking “Chariots of Fire.” In another scene, he danced one cartoonishly difficult solo onscreen and in person, with side-lighting that made shadow figures dancing it on the white walls of either side of the stage too. This made an effective trio of Knights—one flesh, one pixels, one shadow. In this passage, Knight attempted impossible feats like multiple promenades in attitude penché and an endless balance in attitude relevé (like, too long even for Skylar Brandt). Naturally, he bailed out of these things both on film and onstage, and not at the same moments. It was a clever commentary on the Sisyphean pursuit of technique, which was supported by ironically jaunty music that could have been from a “Sesame Street” clip.

These winking grunt work passages were contrasted with him dancing gloriously fluid vocabulary, his legs lunging surely, his shoulders rolling suavely, and his hands flicking like fire. One segment had him standing with his arms upraised as he gently swayed his torso, basking in the glow of the spotlight. Throughout “The Drama,” Knight brilliantly contrasted the pain and the glory of a life in dance. He presented his many injuries to the crowd, humorously holding up various troublesome body parts for examination. “I’m sore all the time, in every part” he lamented in a video segment, while painstakingly applying thick layers of stage makeup. But he also said: “What I look forward to the most now is being present, taking risks, and telling a story.” Jacob shot this sequence through a series of wall and inset hand mirrors, adding layers of distance and distortion—like Knight’s face paint, which both masked and exaggerated his features. Jacob’s artful framing reinforced the paradoxical milieu that Knight—and all dancers and athletes—inhabit: they must be extremely present in their bodies while simultaneously dissociating from the constant pain signals their bodies send.

The other poignant contrast Knight made was in the combination of chance and elbow grease that had brought him to his rarefied post. He stated that his career “should never have happened.” He spoke of his troubled home life, far from any dance studio, where his mother fought to protect him from an abusive father and he harbored a secret crush on the weatherman from Channel 7 News. He said in voiceover: “I always felt different, like I was from a different world.” But when he happened to be assigned homeroom in the dance studio at his school, his life changed overnight. Another example of kismet: Knight shares a birthday with Graham, contributing to the mystical kinship he feels with her. These elements of destiny abutted his self-professed defining trait: relentlessness. He sniffed at Graham’s assertion that it takes ten years to make a dancer. “Ten years! I been doing this since 2005,” he laughed. Fate played a major part in his life, but so did Knight’s persistence—his “madness,” as he called it—which was brilliantly rendered in the repetitive text and choreography, the echoic lighting, the triple mediums, the cached-mirror camerawork, and the ceaselessly lapping tides.

BalletCollective in “The Night Falls” choreographed by Troy Schumacher. Photograph by Maria Baranova

“The Drama” was a long and intense piece, and it was hard to dive without an intermission into a conversation about a full-length work from 2023—BalletCollective’s “The Night Falls”—that was only shown in a few stripped-down excerpts. Yet, slowly, the dancers and singers—particularly Amari Frazier, Dabria Aguilar, Eliza Bagg, Claire Welling, and Angela Yam—brought you into their florid, Floridian dreamscape. “The Night Falls” was co-conceived and created by author Karen Russell (“Swamplandia!”), composer by Ellis Ludwig-Leone, and choreographer/director Troy Schumacher. Ludwig-Leone and Schumacher were on hand to discuss the piece with Spoleto Festival director Mena Mark Hanna, and their passion made me want to see the full work—which, topically, seems ripe for reprisal. With Donald Trump reassuming the presidency this month, a cautionary tale about Floridian carnival barkers reaching out to those in despair through commercial jingles feels apt. Hanna remarked on the “unbridled Americanness” of Florida, which was a suitable descriptor even before Trump turned Mar-a-Lago into the White House South.

Though “Night Falls” was thematically timely, the presence of John Selya (the star of Twyla Tharp’s 2002 dance musical “Movin’ Out”) in the ensemble was a reminder that, contrary to the creative team’s allegations, the bifurcation of roles into singing and dancing interpreters is not a new phenomenon. Opera has employed this technique for a long time, including in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Seven Deadly Sins,” from 1933, which is a part of New York City Ballet history (Schumacher is a soloist in the company). Balanchine choreographed and directed this work in 1933 and 1958, as did Lynne Taylor-Corbett (who sadly passed away this week) in 2011. But this dancing/singing performative divide is trendy again, with Justin Peck’s similarly structured “Illinoise” jumping from the Park Avenue Armory to a run on Broadway just last year.

More links to the present day and to the preceding piece emerged as the presentation continued. For one thing, it was fascinating to contrast the movement qualities of the two works’ protagonists: Knight and Frazier. Physically, they were foils; both are slim, fluid, and flexible Black men. Yet Knight moves weightily—as if made of marble—while Frazier floats like a cloud. The differences in Graham technique and the balletic contemporary style were pronounced.

Despite this dichotomy, a siren theme ran through both works and ultimately unified the evening. In “Night Falls,” Frazier and others were summoned to the sea by a trio of operatic sirens. Knight was guided throughout his life by Graham’s aesthetics, steps, imagery, and even her literal voice in the score of “The Drama.” Knight’s compulsion to dance, which he claimed “wasn’t a choice,” also echoed a siren’s call. Or was he a siren in his own right, beckoning to us from the rocks at the water’s edge?

Sirens are an ancient trope, but a pertinent one. As we reinstate a showman as president, it is a fine time to examine the ways in which we are all called by voices, through various media and artforms. (See also: the vivid episode “Jibaro” of the sci-fi series “Love, Death & Robots,” which explores complex ideas about victimization and colonization through the figure of a dancing siren.) Ludwig-Leone explained how in “The Night Falls,” the “physical language of the community becomes the tethers to the mast that will save them.” In the same hopeful vein, Graham’s works acted as a lifeline for Knight. May we all find such a dance right now.

Faye Arthurs

Faye Arthurs is a former ballet dancer with New York City Ballet. She chronicled her time as a professional dancer in her blog Thoughts from the Paint. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in English from Fordham University. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their sons.

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