✦ Origins ✦
Kyle Abraham created Pavement in 2012 for his company Abraham.In.Motion, drawing on two sources separated by more than a century: W.E.B. Du Bois's 1903 essay collection The Souls of Black Folk, whose concept of "double consciousness" runs through the piece, and John Singleton's 1991 film Boyz n the Hood, about young Black men navigating violence and constrained futures in South Central Los Angeles.
Layered onto these two sources is Abraham's own memory of growing up in the Hill District, a historically Black neighborhood in Pittsburgh reshaped over decades by disinvestment and urban renewal. The piece moves between documentary-style social observation and personal reminiscence, portraying a community's daily life and resilience under structural and physical violence rather than presenting a single, linear story. Abraham has spoken of wanting to place a century-old sociological text, a widely seen Hollywood film, and his own lived memory of a specific place on equal footing, refusing to treat any one of the three as more authoritative than the others in telling the neighborhood's story.
Structure
The choreography mixes concert-dance vocabulary with hip-hop-inflected floorwork and street movement and plainer, pedestrian gesture, moving fluidly between them rather than treating any one register as dominant. Full-ensemble sections build a sense of shared neighborhood life, contrasted with isolated solo and duet passages that register individual loss and grief within that community. Recorded score and sound design combine music with sampled and spoken audio, keeping the throughline between Du Bois's history, Singleton's fiction, and Abraham's own memory audible throughout. Costuming and design stay close to everyday streetwear rather than abstract theatrical dress, reinforcing the sense that the piece is portraying a real, specific community rather than a symbolic or generalized one, and the choreography's shifts between tenderness and sudden bursts of violent energy are left unresolved rather than building toward a conventional dramatic climax.
Reception & Legacy
Pavement was widely reviewed as one of the defining Black-led contemporary dance works of the early 2010s, praised for the way it layers historical scholarship, cinema, and personal memory into a single choreographic argument about place and violence. It helped establish Abraham's national reputation in the years leading up to his 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, and it continues to be discussed and taught as a model for dance that engages directly with social history rather than treating it only as background. The piece is also frequently discussed as an early, fully realized example of the choreographic voice Abraham would go on to bring to major ballet companies in later years, one that moves comfortably between concert dance, hip-hop-derived vocabulary, and socially engaged subject matter without treating any of those registers as incompatible.
Read alongside Abraham's later, more institutionally embedded commissions, Pavement shows how much of the vocabulary and subject matter he later brought to New York City Ballet and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was already fully formed years earlier, inside his own company and on his own terms.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer Kyle Abraham.