"I'll be around...": Love and Forté transform BAX

As you move within Memory Withholdings, you might forget that you're in an arts center in Park Slope--although that ambulance wailing past BAX's Fifth Avenue windows last night did not help. For the most part, though, the "memories" successfully cast a heavy spell in this immersive performance by Love|Forté, a Collective. Nia Love and Marjani Forté, creative partners and choreographers, have imagined BAX's spaces as a memory palace filled with suspended keepsake photographs and artifacts; video imagery overlapped by shadows; and unnamed spirits from the Black American ancestral diaspora.

These two women--we first see each one creeping, sprawling or sliding over surfaces from wall to wall--are immensely free and forceful in physicality and voice. Uncontained and uncontainable, they spring from deep time and deep places parallel to our own. I think of their work here as both shamanic and clowning (in the shamanic sense). There is no separation of the heart between Love and nature, and none between Forté--who thinks nothing of dancing large with hefty kitchen knife in hand--and pure emotion. Illumined and illuminating beings, they frighten and they thrill.

And they bring it all home--to the chopping of humble vegetables around a kitchen table, to petty spats and hearty laughter and declarations of love.

with video and media design by Vincent Ballentine of Flux Innovations

Memory Withholdings runs through Sunday evening with performances at 8pm. Seating is limited. For information and tickets, click here.

BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange
421 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)