Jamar Roberts’s Second Act

Jamar Roberts is the choreographer of the moment. His dances are in demand, with commissions from ballet and modern-dance companies across the country, including two world premières this season in New York. His work is often highly political: he has taken on gun violence, COVID isolation, and protest; now, with “Foreseeable Future,” for New York City Ballet, he addresses climate change. In a recent interview, he explained that he had read a newspaper report about climate protesters disrupting an N.Y.C.B. performance, and, although he found this “rude” to the dancers, he also felt that the protesters “were kinda right.” He wanted to “disrupt” what he sees as the escapist and perfectionist aspect of ballet with a dance about the threat of human extinction. A ballet, but also a provocation, one that raises a long-standing question: In a time of political crisis, what can art and artists do?

Roberts, who is forty-two and grew up in Miami, joined the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre at nineteen and danced there for nearly two decades, until 2021. He began to make dances in 2016, and his early choreography—astonishingly original and powerful—was inextricably tied to his own dancing and the ways he could morph his majestic six-foot-four body as if it were molten. I have rarely seen a dancer who projects such humility and calm while sustaining an intense physicality and focus on movement itself. And, although his choreography frequently treats political themes, he is a pure dance formalist. This creates a tension in his work: he doesn’t make statements; he makes dances, and his best political work is expressed through the abstract movement that characterizes his dancing. A choreographer in a dancer’s skin.

In 2019, for example, he made “Ode,” to Don Pullen’s jazz recording “Suite (Sweet) Malcolm (Part 1: Memories and Gunshots).” The dance opens against a colorful backdrop of flowers; a Black man lies on the ground—bare chest, loose pants, basic. He rises and dances, as though in a memory or resurrection, and five others join him. As the music moves into dissonant free-jazz exploration, the dancers ride over it, as if nothing could touch them; Roberts has said that the dance was a response to gun violence, but there are no shots or stricken bodies, until the fallen one gently falls again, the other dancers fusing, body to body, in what Roberts calls “this one long arm,” to lower the man back into a lifeless heap. They have helped him die, and, as they fade offstage, he is just there, beneath the flowers. It is not a lament or a wail but a gentler act, like a wreath laid on a grave. Similarly, during the pandemic lockdown Roberts made “Cooped,” a profoundly disorienting, rigorously crafted five-minute filmed dance solo that he shot alone on his iPad in a small basement—his exposed body in an abstract, racially tinged study of confinement and anguish.

Roberts retired as a dancer in 2021, when he left Ailey, and since then I have often found his work wandering and diffuse, as if he’d lost some vital connection to his creative being. His first piece for the N.Y.C.B. stage, “Emanon—In Two Movements” (2022), was a pure dance tribute to Balanchine, but Roberts’s own voice seemed missing. Two years later, at Ailey, he took a more narrative approach, with “Al-Andalus Blues,” set to Miles Davis’s “Sketches of Spain” and pieces by Roberta Flack. The dance, about Moorish Spain, was stagey, heavy on pomp and gesture but slight on dancing. But another piece that year—“We the People,” for the Martha Graham Dance Company—hinted at a more promising path. It was billed as being about protest, but the topic was handled obliquely, with the protest lying in the juxtaposition of public and private states. Roberts intercut light dances, to music by Rhiannon Giddens performed by a live bluegrass band, with suspended moments of silence and darkness, as when the dancer Lloyd Knight slowly wound himself in torquing pain into a knot, as if handcuffed, or hung backward from a wide stance, hinged at the knees and dangling upside down from the hips, jugular exposed. The dance suggested a return to the inner worlds, more feeling than fact, that had made Roberts such a fine dancer.

Earlier this year, at City Center, Roberts came back to the stage as a dancer in “Dance Is a Mother,” a work that he made for the N.Y.C.B. star Sara Mearns and three other dancers, to music by Caroline Shaw. Roberts led the dancing with his arms, making shapes that broke and swooped back on themselves, pulling the rest of his body with them. In his presence, Mearns seemed clarified. Her thick balletic technique fell away to reveal something more essential—not emotion (she always had that) but a distancing from it, as if she were watching herself go by. Roberts and Mearns told an interviewer that the ballet was a reflection on their love-hate relationship with dancing, but what I saw was choreographically scattered, like material for a dance that many of us would have liked to see—but didn’t. It was only at the very end that the work momentarily revealed itself. Mearns is just three years younger than Roberts, and it was as if he had returned to dancing to accompany her at this precipitous time in a dancer’s life: she fell to the floor, and Roberts went to her, offered a hand, and they danced briefly. He left, and she stood uncertainly near the wings until a warm light flooded over her. She stepped into it—and off the stage.

“Foreseeable Future,” at N.Y.C.B., marks a break and, to my mind, a crisis for Roberts as an artist. The curtain rose on an empty stage with a jarring electronic blast by the Venezuelan-born musician Arca. As the lights went up, we saw four spectacular winged creatures: two in flesh-colored unitards and flowing beige wings (Taylor Stanley and Ryan Tomash), and two (Mearns and Isabella LaFreniere) wearing long, red, honeycomb-patterned dresses with huge fire-red wings spreading from their backs. These elaborate costumes, by the iconoclastic Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen, dominated what followed: a pretty choreography of wings and light, with only the most basic movements; the women in particular were little more than porters for the striking but constrictive wings. As the birds departed, the light turned cold, and a sickly blue-green sun illuminated the backdrop. Eight dancers appeared, four of them in short, metallic triangular dresses, their feet encased in steely gray (no pointe shoes), hair spooled tight into high buns, and faces grimly fixed. They moved through angular balletic poses and patterns with machinelike precision.