“An Untitled Love” at Newman Center

Not long ago, Kyle Abraham returned to the city that shaped him as an artist. The renowned choreographer and MacArthur Fellow visited his hometown of Pittsburgh for the local premiere of “An Untitled Love,” performed by his dance company, A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham.

Set to the music of R&B virtuoso D’Angelo, “An Untitled Love” has a slow-grooving, finger-popping vibe. With its plastic-covered sofa and cone-shaped floor lamp, the set hints at an achy nostalgia for the mysteries and humor of a house party thrown by one’s parents. In what should be one of the not-to-be-missed offerings of the nascent new year, A.I.M. brings that full-length dance to the Newman Center for the Performing Arts at the end of January.

For Abraham, who lives in New York City, that stop in Pittsburgh was a fitting return to a place where the arts took an early hold on his imagination. The city is home to Carnegie Mellon University and the Andy Warhol Museum (where he had a job as an educator for a short time after college in New York City). His parents, who were educators, enrolled him and his sister in art classes at Carnegie Mellon.

“My sister worked at Heinz Hall, which is where the symphony performed. as an usher. And I grew up playing the cello. It’s a city where there is always, for me, a lot of art and culture around,” Abraham, 44, recalled during a video call. “I could be the rave kid with the massive JNCO jeans playing my cello and still go to the hip-hop parties and not be viewed as someone who’s trying to be white.”

Pittsburgh is also the home of the late August Wilson, one of the nation’s most revered and influential playwrights, and loving chronicler of the city’s vivid, vibrant Black life. It’s an intimacy and passion that Abraham shares. His parents, Gregory and Jackie Abraham (both deceased), participated in a host of “amazing, Black-led organizations that would have their fashion shows or their card parties,” recalled Abraham. There were jazz brunches after Sunday church service. There were weekend nights of bid whist and tonk card games.

As a boy, he would hang around the edges of his parents’ social gatherings, soaking in the repartee and the spice, the affection and fun, which he’s captured in “An Untitled Love.” “I would be the kid who shouldn’t be at the party,” he said with a laugh. Joking with those adults, being allowed to bear witness to their different activities, “really helped me find my artistic voice.” And what a voice it is.

In 2013, Abraham was named a MacArthur Fellow. “In works for his own company … and others, startling shifts in gestures and music create a rich dialogue between internal emotional landscapes and shared cultural experiences,” stated the citation for the MacArthur, often known as the “genius grant.”

The MacArthur came early in a career that has since ascended other pinnacles. In 2018, he created “The Runaway” for the New York City Ballet company, the first Black to choreograph a piece in more than a decade. (He has since created two more.) In 2019, he created a solo for American Ballet Theatre’s principal Misty Copeland.

The words that describe the choreographer’s work might suggest a binarism — fluid and sharp, vigorous and graceful, potent and generous, electric and hushed — but that’s just a writer’s failing. To wax nostalgic, let’s just say his choreography is “all that and a bag of chips” (and we love chips). His work moves with a clarity and muscular elegance as it plumbs the blue-indigo depths of Black culture, delivering flashes of incandescent feeling. It is the stuff of house parties or pick-up basketball games but also modern dance by way of Martha Graham and Paul Taylor.

“An Untitled Love” “is so autobiographical and rooted in his own experience — as a person, as a person of color, as a Black man in this country, all of those things. But it’s still really about him,” said Newman Center executive director Aisha Ahmad-Post, who saw the piece in 2020, and has waited through the worst of COVID to bring it to Denver.

A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham’s Denver stop underscores the Newman Center’s commitment to contemporary dance. In the fall, the renowned company Philobus performed. In late March, the Paul Taylor Dance Company will visit the Newman’s Gates Concert Hall stage.

In addition to Newman Center Presents, there are the well-regarded local choreographers shaping the city’s dance profile and making it a hub, including visionary artist Cleo Parker Robinson and her self-named ensemble; and Garrett Ammon and his company, Wonderbound. In December, Edgar L. Page was recognized at a delayed luncheon for his Mayor’s Excellence in Arts & Culture 2021 Innovation Award.