In 2019, for example, he made “Ode,” to Don Pullen’s jazz recording “Suite (Sweet) Malcolm (Part 1: Memories and Gunshots).” The dance opens against a colorful backdrop of flowers; a Black man lies on the ground—bare chest, loose pants, basic. He rises and dances, as though in a memory or resurrection, and five others join him. As the music moves into dissonant free-jazz exploration, the dancers ride over it, as if nothing could touch them; Roberts has said that the dance was a response to gun violence, but there are no shots or stricken bodies, until the fallen one gently falls again, the other dancers fusing, body to body, in what Roberts calls “this one long arm,” to lower the man back into a lifeless heap. They have helped him die, and, as they fade offstage, he is just there, beneath the flowers. It is not a lament or a wail but a gentler act, like a wreath laid on a grave. Similarly, during the pandemic lockdown Roberts made “Cooped,” a profoundly disorienting, rigorously crafted five-minute filmed dance solo that he shot alone on his iPad in a small basement—his exposed body in an abstract, racially tinged study of confinement and anguish.