Prep School: Live! The Realest MC

Kyle Abraham is a dancer, choreographer, MacArthur genius – and NYU alum! He founded A.I.M (formerly “Abraham In Motion”) in 2006 and quickly rose to prominence with his “sensual, thoughtful, wild, stuttering” works that bring the politics of race, gender and sexuality to the stage.

Abraham described Live! The Realest MC in the Washington Post, when he was restaged the work in 2014:

It premiered in 2011 . . . kind of looking at masculinity through my middle school and high school years, and even still today, and thinking about what the influence was from my peers and people in my community. There was a point where I felt like I needed to put on this hip-hop bravado to be more of a man, and so this is really my take on the story of Pinocchio. But instead of his quest to be a real boy, I made it my quest to be a “real man” and thinking about what that is. And kind of flipping it in a sense. It’s really about the falsities of this caricature that you’re putting on to be seen as more of a man, when in actuality it’s making you more of a puppet — this kind of generic robot. I sometimes say it’s a gay industrial story of Pinocchio seen through a hip-hop lens.