The first half of A.I.M by Kyle Abraham’s performance in The Kay Theater at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center was a reprise of their 2024 appearance at the George Mason Center for the Arts. Everything in the first act was well worth a second viewing, but Rena Butler’s “Shell of A Shell of The Shell,” a work new to the DMV which closed the program, stole the show.

‘Shell of A Shell of The Shell,’ a work by Rena Butler…took my breath away… easily the most enthralling piece of dance I have seen this year.

“Someday Soon,” by choreographer Keerati Jinakunwiphat, opened the evening. When A.I.M. brought the work to Center for the Arts last spring, it had only recently premiered. Writing about it for MD Theatre Guide I said that I wished I could have seen it again. This side of a year later, “Someday Soon” felt tighter and more meticulous. The sudden changes in movement quality, from sweeping speed to sudden suspension, had the effortless precision of something sanded smooth over many performances. 

Amari Frazier’s performance of Paul Singh’s “Just Your Two Wrists” was impeccable. Crisp lines were broken by urgent repeated gestures as Frazier arced from one corner of the stage to another. Immersed in David Lang and Trio Mediaeval’s spectral vocals, the solo felt like a meditation. 

“MotorRover,” choreographed by A.I.M Artistic Director Kyle Abraham in collaboration with the A.I.M. dancers and performed by Jamaal Bowman and Donovan Reed, is a work best experienced up close. When I saw the piece in 2024, I was in the back row of the orchestra. The George Mason Center for the Arts is a considerably larger theater than The Kay. Coming from the pre-performance discussion and sitting in the back of the house, I walked away thinking about the context of the work and its relationship to Merce Cunningham’s 1972 “Landrover” to which it is a response. It was a somewhat removed, dry, and predominantly intellectual experience of the piece. Wednesday night in The Kay, I was close enough to hear the dancers breath, to see the sweat dripping off their faces, and feel the palpable connection between them. For a work of many minutes that takes place entirely without music, the physical quality of that relationship was everything. It carried the choreography and gave it an entirely different dimension.

Abraham’s “Show Pony,” danced by Alysia Johhnson, opened the second half of the program. This solo was a striking contrast to “Just Your Two Wrists” in almost every way. With its high legs, popped hips, club lighting, sparkly unitard, and aggressive electric drum corps soundtrack from Jlin, “Show Pony” came out of the gate at eleven and only went up from there. 

“Shell of A Shell of The Shell,” a work by Rena Butler which premiered in 2024, took my breath away. It is easily the most enthralling piece of dance I have seen this year. It began in haze, two shafts of light cutting through the darkness towards center like skylights in a cave. As the dancers writhed and undulated through the patchy shadows, the effect was ritualistic and primal, almost animalistic like a ceremony of possession out of deep time. As dancer Oliva Wang mouthed a scream from the edge of a pool of light against a distorted vocal in the score, I got goosebumps. The dancers morphed across the stage, the top lights went out, and the cyclorama at the back of the stage popped into white, leaving the dancers in sharp silhouette. They carved across the space and slowly the lights pulsed up. The dancers repeatedly rushed downstage, flinging themselves against the fourth wall of the proscenium, against the edge of the light, only to stagger backwards. They came to the edge again and the lights in the house went up. They were watchful, predatory, and they could see us. The dancers retreated into the shadows and the high shafts of toplight returned, but now the light was broken into a multitude of rays, like afternoon sunshine through the high windows of a church, casting a mosaic pattern across the floor.

Dan Scully’s lighting design for “Shell” was extraordinary. Regular concert dance goers are used to seeing choreographic ideas developed in a thematic way like a phrase of music, and contemporary dance loves dramatic lighting with stark changes. However, the visual motifs of light in this piece were developed over the course of the work in counterpoint and with the same sophistication as the choreographic themes. The difference and repetition of the visual textures was a key element of building the world the dancers inhabited, and the dancers’ relationship to that light, and the spaces it defined, was one of the central themes of the piece.

In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” the true forms of reality exist under the sun. Those trapped in the cave see only the shadows those forms cast on the wall of the space in which they are trapped. There is a single truth, a single source of light, and a single shell. The truth exists outside the shell and only shades of it exist within. “Shell” offers a different theory. Butler’s program note states, “‘Shell of A Shell of The Shell’ dissects themes of self-excavation in restrictive spaces to open the mind’s eye of cultural differences and the challenges one may face in operating under, building, and dismantling perpetuated systems or habits.” In these manifold spaces defined by light, there is not a single cave and a single sun, but a haunted labyrinth full of shadows and light twisting in on itself. True forms are not definitive but unknowable, brightly lit in the reality outside of our cave; rather, it is in the act of peeling back the layers of many shells that we find the truth of experience. 

Running Time: Approximately two hours with one 15-minute intermission.

Advisory: Includes the use of stage fog.

“A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham” ran March 5-6, 2025 in The Kay Theater at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland, 8270 Alumni Drive, College Park, MD 20742. More information about A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham is available through their website. For more information and tickets for upcoming events at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, please online.