Black unlimited: André M. Zachery untames space

André M. Zachery/Renegade Performance Group
dances the world premiere of Untamed Space
this week at Danspace Project.
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Untamed Space--a new work by André M. Zachery/Renegade Performance Group at Danspace Project--is an epic fantasia envisioning Black creativity and survival on a grand scale. And I mean a really grand, world-regenerating intent the likes of which one might find in a fantasy or sci-fi novel but with everything animated for you outside the confines of your own brain. Zachery is a Black artist with his eye on the past (renegade "maroon" colonies of escaped African slaves), the fraught present, and the future (a new Great Migration with the stars our destination). Abstract and subtly metaphoric, this work is 70 minutes of heady stuff, including Zachery's trippy visual projections, Carol Mullins's fanciful lighting and an electronic stew, by composer/sound artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, evolving in depth and intensity.

Zachery's initial projections--liquified, distorting shapes that appear derived from Haitian veve symbols in eye-popping acid green and turquoise--flow and undulate against a dark screen. The choreographer, in similar fashion, has created a dance style emphasizing organic forms--bendy, furling and unfurling, rolling and cascading, reaching and twining good green things that break through and spring up no matter how much death surrounds them. At one point, too, these beautiful movers--Kentoria Earle, Candace Thompson, Nehemoyia Young and Zachery--reminded me of starfish. I didn't remember at the time, but starfish--or, sea stars, as researchers call them--can grow a new limb if one has been severed or, in rare cases, even regenerate their central disk. Zachery's dancers forever shoot out and deploy limbs and energy from their own "central disks."

Starting with a gradual procession of dancers into the space, the dance accumulates in urgency--first earthbound and propulsive movements, then standing, sometimes interactive behavior, either lyrical or percussive. Vocal passages in the music--such as a warm, muffled remix of Mahalia Jackson "in the upper room...talkin' with my Lord"--seem to herald emergence of desire and new language. As noted by dramaturge Rosamond S. King, Zachery has drawn from his cultural roots in Haiti, the American south and Chicago and a variety of dance styles. Reaching into this rich heritage, he embraces Afrofuturism as a way to understand how Black people have existed, what forces sustain our existence and how it might continue.

At times, Untamed Space and its dancers seem overpowered and diffused by the performance space. A time, its starscape journey yields too much similarity in  movement. Its seventy minutes can seem unnecessarily stretched. Still, Zachery leads us to a final image suggestive of unity and preparedness. The future exists within and among us. It's up to us to bring it to light.

Untamed Space runs through Saturday, September 30, with performances at 8pm with no late seating. Facilitated discussions run each night for a half-hour beginning at 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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