LITTLE MOVEMENTS

A choreographer getting her big break faces professional and personal complications.

Layla Smart has spent 33 years following her mother’s injunction not to fulfill stereotypical notions of what someone born poor and Black is like and what she can achieve. She’s worked in PR at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for nearly a decade while slowly building a career as a choreographer. She and husband Eli have been together for eight years, and although he not-so-covertly resents her determination to move on from a recent miscarriage, he declares himself thrilled at her opportunity to be choreographer-in-residence for nine months at Vermont’s prestigious Briar House. Layla is not thrilled to realize, in her first conversation with Briar House’s director, that she has been pigeonholed as “the next great hope of the Black dance canon” and is expected to create a piece about “everything happening in the world right now…The pain. The injustice.” That’s emphatically not Layla’s style; she claims the right to have diverse influences and to make dance that’s “abstract, more concerned with shape and musicality than specific themes.” As Morrow’s well-written debut moves forward, however, we see that Layla’s resistance to stereotyping may be holding her back artistically. The abrupt replacement of one of her dancers is the first indication that there’s a lot going on under the surface at Briar House, and there will be more. Layla shares the author’s personal background in dance studies at Connecticut College and PR work at BAM, to the benefit of absorbing scenes chronicling the development of her Briar House piece and a smart understanding of how the media operates, demonstrated by the key role a New York Times article plays in the cleverly plotted denouement. But this is more than autobiography transplanted into fiction; psychologically astute portraits of Layla’s evolving relationship with Eli, her mother, and her past make her decision at the end to choose fresh artistic and personal paths well earned and satisfying.

A thoughtful, engrossing first novel.