Choreographer Kyle Abraham And A.I.M. Join Forces With Electronic Music Composer Jlin Soraya Premiere

Mozart's unfinished Requiem is the jumping-off point for MacArthur Genius Kyle Abraham and pioneering producer, composer, and EDM artist Jlin's latest collaboration, Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth.

Combining traditions and innovations in both dance and music, they explore folklore, death, and reincarnation in a powerful piece that demands the dancers have command of techniques ranging from ballet to street dance.

Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth is an hour of imaginative and ambitious theater, with an electronic Mozart meditation musical score by Jlin, costumes by British fashion designer Giles Deacon, and set and lighting by longtime Abraham associate Dan Scully. The performance debuts on Sat, Feb 18 at 8 p.m. at The Soraya.

Co-commissioned by New York's Lincoln Center, and featuring 10 dancers from Abraham's company, A.I.M, the new piece repositions the classical Requiem as an exploration of rebirth, ritual, and the afterlife. The result is a stunning and abstract rewiring of mythology, folklore, and Afrofuturism. In the wake of 2020 - marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests - Abraham and Jlin explore the central theme of one of the most canonical works of white Western classical music - death and the myths of reincarnation - from an explicitly Black perspective.

In his fluid choreographic language, Abraham draws from the repertoire of classical ballet, hip-hop, modern dance, and street dance while Jlin takes Mozart's classic requiem and turns it into an electronic dance piece, building her sound on a style of house dance and street dance that originated in Chicago in the 1990s. In collaboration with fashion designer Giles Deacon, an innovator of the Paris couture scene with his expansive prints and pop references for both his own label and numerous fashion houses, 10 dancers and Jlin transform Mozart's music into an electronic opus that memorializes ritual, mourning, and rebirth.