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| Shamar Wayne Watt (photo: Scott Shaw) |
This week, Brooklyn's JACK performance space is presenting a new version of Gully spring: Di exhortation, a dance piece by Jamaica-born Shamar Wayne Watt, originally shown on a Gibney program curated by Nora Chipaumire. (See my review of that late 2017 engagement here.) Just short of an hour, the piece centers Afro-Atlantic spirituality as a landscape of resistance to colonial power and the constraints of Eurocentric Christianity. The work embodies and elevates family with the presence of Watt's mother, Valerie Davis, who contributes her choir-singing joy and, now at JACK, brother Lamar Jerome Watt, a Florida-based student athlete and krump dancer.
The center of Gully spring, though, remains the prophet Watt, mounting a platform and revolving and testifying beneath the ongoing baptismal drip of a gallon jug of water suspended above his head. I recall, from Gibney's promotion, that he declared a new religion of his own making, drawn from African-Jamaican traditions and Pentecostal worship as well as the political awareness and urgency of the moment. Is it not fitting and right that he administer his own benediction?
You have one last chance to witness this performance I called "exhortative, magnetic, formidable" this evening at JACK (8pm). For information and tickets, click here.
JACK
505 ½ Waverly Ave, Brooklyn
C or G train to Clinton-Washington
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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.
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