Is nostalgia just the mental sweater that coats the memories that dance through our brains?

Over the years, I’ve made works that reference the intersection of classical music and the birth of hip hop in my life, but the voices of ’80s, ’90s pop, and New Wave were braided all through my interests and experiences.

I wanted to make a work that honored a different side of my influences… one that emphasizes a very particular part of what it was like dancing on the back of the yellow and black school buses of my elementary and middle school years to music that’s equal parts M/A/R/R/S, Suzanne Vega, Salt-N-Pepa, The B-52s, LL Cool J, and Prince.

With the birth of music video culture in the early 1980s, an awakening of fantasy, street culture, and a popular hybridization of form seemed like the way of the future.

That hybridization speaks to the intentional fusing of movement vocabularies including ballet technique and heavy influence of released-based articulation for this new work, entitled Cassette Vol. 1.

Though not solely limited to released-based work, the influences of Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, Kevin Wynn are among several highlighted throughout the entirety of this endeavor.

Those movement vocabularies utilized are meant to honor the lineage of movement influences that might not be as obvious to some, while highlighting the non-monolithic Black experience and intake within American culture.

Cassette Vol.1 is equal parts camp and critique. At its core, it aims to make space for the ridiculous and the referential.

There is space to laugh at the extremes, and cry from the subtle humanity of memories lost.

—Kyle Abraham