Pavement at BAM Fisher

A black man and a white man meet on a basketball court. The white man lowers the black man’s body gently to the ground, wraps him in a tender headlock, and places his hands behind his back. This devastating gesture becomes the grounding refrain of dancer-choreographer Kyle Abraham’s Pavement, inspired by the 1991 hip-hop drama Boyz n the Hood, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, and the historically black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. Against a diverse sonic backdrop—clips of the film’s dialogue mixed with the music of Handel and Sam Cooke—Abraham’s dancers bound and rebound with hip-hop attack and balletic flow, while handshakes become fistfights and pas de deux and bodies stack up against each other and the ground.