mayfield brooks: improvising while Black at GIBNEY

mayfield brooks
(photo: Amar Puri)

I spent some time this week drifting back into that intriguing realm that Reggie Wilson's Danspace Project platform opened a few weeks ago (Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance). Back with native people of stolen lands and enslaved people of the Middle Passage, back beneath the physical and psychic layers that make up present day Manhattan--this time, though, instigated and guided by mayfield brooks who calls her/their dance practice Improvising While Black.

With the three-part IWB: Dancing in the Hold, brooks opened a new series at GIBNEY called Gathering Place: Black Queer Land(ing), curated by Marýa Wethers as a place of "intersection among blackness, queerness and indigeneity." This series will continue with performances by jumatatu m. poe (Apr 19–21) and I Moving Lab (Apr 26–28).

The design of brooks's IWB: Dancing in the Hold breaks the framework for presentation. It is not one thing; it is different things. People gather not to just watch people do stuff but possibly do stuff themselves. Anything originally planned for one point in time might easily show up in another. And we all bring ourselves to it because it can't exist without us. In essence, this truly is Black space.

IWB: Dancing in the Hold is a performance in three parts investigating mayfield brooks’ ongoing project, Improvising While Black (IWB), which uses dance improvisation as a tool to create atmospheres of care and inquiry while listening to ancestral whispers of the middle passage.

Part I, P(a)rLAY, is an invitation to Black-identified artists to participate in an improvisational dance workshop and performance exploring IWB’s improvisatory techniques including speaking in tongues, wandering practices, somatic awakenings and partner work.

Part II, Dancing in the Hold, is an evening-length performance exploring underwater textures like shipwrecks and contaminated seaweed while embracing Black queer ancestors, Black rage, brilliance and joy.

Part III, Process(Ion), is a durational performance installation exploring gestures of Black revolt, poetics of oceanic abyss, spontaneous readings of Afropessimist scholarly texts and a procession to the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan.

P(a)rLAY was my second time taking a workshop with brooks--the first, hosted by Movement Research at Abrons Arts Center. Once again, I was amazed by how one gifted teacher's gentle invitations can quickly lead to profound revelations.

brooks has been spending time visiting, contemplating and drawing inspiration from the nearby African Burial Ground memorial. We visited as well, on a windy late afternoon, the twelve of us, and took away impressions for the work we would do together back in the Black Box studio. We also wrote letters to ancestors known and unknown, and learned meaningful things in the writing that perhaps we would never have attained any other way.

I will not be able to attend the durational event, Part III, tomorrow. However, I did return to GIBNEY's Black Box last night for Part II, Dancing in the Hold. I witnessed the entirety of it through a shroud of silver. Because I was a spirit. Because brooks asked nicely. Because two of us from the P(a)rLAY workshop showed up/said yes. So, into the depths where inky dark and screams and whimpers are broken by bioluminescence. Where a switched-on, unrestrained brooks is joined in liberation by South Africa's outstanding Mlondi Zondi.

It's late in the day now, but tickets might remain for tonight's show. Try for them!

For information and tickets for mayfield brooks's events tonight and tomorrow, click here. For information, tickets and series passes for Gathering Place: Black Queer Land(ing), click here.

GIBNEY
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
Subways: 4/5/6 to Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall; N/R/W to City Hall; 2/3 to Park Place

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Queer NY presents Mamela Nyamza's "HATCHED"

South African dance artist Mamela Nyamza
in her solo, HATCHED, at Abrons Arts Center
 (photos: John Hogg)

Did I hear right?

It took several years of effort for Shay Wafer's 651 Arts--now co-presenting with Queer New York International Arts Festival--to finally bring South African dancer Mamela Nyamza to New York?

And for only one night?

Curated by Marýa Wethers, Nyamza's HATCHED introduced an artist I wish more New Yorkers could have experienced. Attendance was sparse. Every seat in Abrons Arts Center's Playhouse theater should have been claimed.

(photo: John Hogg)

Abrons has smaller, less formal and more flexible spaces well-suited to alternative dance and performance. But Nyamza pointedly mixed the classically formal (tutu, pointe work, port de bras, Saint-Saëns) with the unexpected (blood-red laundry, looking, for all the world, like flayed flesh or butcher cuts, that she hung to dry on a line strung between the wings). She needed honest-to-god proscenium space for the razzle dazzle of her visual imagery and lighting. She created a jarring, split-awareness for audience members first to take their seats before the show began. We listened to The Dying Swan and gazed out on Nyamza's bare back, shaved head, waves of crimson fabric engulfing her white tulle as, beyond the hall's flung-open doors, stragglers continued their loud chatter.

From the outset, HATCHED announces itself as both forbidding and irresistible--and sacred--very much in its own space, which we must focus to approach.

And it was no surprise when, during the post-show Q&A with Wethers, Nyamza revealed that, in performance, she goes into her "zone," communing with her deceased mother and other ancestors, and that she aims to welcome us into the work while maintaining an unbreachable distance.

Dramatically reflecting the tension between Nyamza's ballet training--with which she maintains a complicated relationship--and her Xhosa heritage and artistry, the solo suggests a search for her true self beyond all external structures, expectations, appearances. Her work is sourced in her life. Married and a mother, Nyamza left her husband for a woman and now exults in her life as an out lesbian. The personal is the political is the poetic.

Let's hope for more chances to see what Nyamza, an artist of arresting skill and a woman of much charm, might have to offer. I hope it will not take long for her to return to New York's venues.

HATCHED is closed, but for other events in the 2016 Queer New York International Arts Festival--running through October 2 at various venues--click here.

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