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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Hamilton and Zachery at University Settlement's Performance Project

André M. Zachery (left) and LaMont Hamilton
(photo: Layla Zami)

The dance series Five on the Black Hand Side/Dapline! draws its title from the practice of the dap ("dap" meaning "dignity and pride"), a spectrum of elaborate gestural greetings and supportive hugs between Black men. Visual artist/photographer LaMont Hamilton and André M. Zachery of Brooklyn's Renegade Performance Group have curated three programs that can be seen as commentary on, as Hamilton has written about one of the works, "Not 'Black Lives Matter' but blackness as matter moving throughout the space; real and present."

Last evening, the series opened with three works that approached this embodied Black presence in different ways, each with a flavor of dreamlike timelessness.

Oxana Chi
(photo: Layla Zami)

Oxana Chi (Oxana Chi & Ensemble Xinren) comes to us from Germany, a dancer of Nigerian and Eastern European origin. A chart of her dance background would look like a spinning globe--from ballet and Cunningham and jazz to Javanese and Egyptian dance. Her solo Neferet iti, performed to live music by Layla Zami and a recorded score by Gilbert Trefzger and Abdoul Aziz Sinka, dares to draw visual and kinetic elements from different cultures, too, in a quilt-like, multi-textured performance. Her Central American plumed headdress, her yellow-gold harem pants, her hip thrusts and shimmies, her archer's bow draws, Masai jumps, capoeira maneuvers, vogue hands and dervish spins add up to a heady mixture. She believes it all works--you can see that--and makes it work. A somewhat delicate presence, she is, nevertheless, a woman writ large, claiming concert dance space for a diverse and teeming world, blessing that space. I don't claim to understand the two theatrical sneezes--clearly not real afflictions--that punctuated sections of Chi's performance. Perhaps the audience was meant to respond by offering its own blessing.

Hamilton collaborates with sound artist Jeremy Toussaint Baptiste on Evil Nigger (pt 1), a hallucinatory performance in which he sits behind a small table covered in a drop cloth and smears his dark chocolate face and white dress shirt and tie with a succession of gloopy paints--white, red and black. He is flesh-and-blood canvas, wrecking convention, striking out for something unknown in what starts off, it might appear, as a sendup of blackface and veers out of control. Like the droning, distorted music, the streaks and splotches and ungainly blends of stark, gleaming wet color eventually turn him into a still object of art fading from our view as the lighting slowly drains away.

The dap originated in the Vietnam War/Black Power era with Black GIs and spread throughout African American communities as a way for Black men to express cultural identity and support. In Zachery and Hamilton's ensemble piece, Dapline!, six men of color perform a fugue-like imagining of military discipline and, at the same time, reveal a tight community responsive to the pain, frustration and momentary failures of its members. The idea of the dap is addressed both in spirit and, later in the piece, in technical execution. The viewer marvels at the unity and elegance of this corps of men, the clean architecture of their shifting arrangements and movements in space, the softness and tranquility that can emerge when masculinity is unshackled, given more than one narrow definition. We watch some of the daps performed in slow motion, skin sliding over skin, our eyes absorbing the beauty and meaning of these silent interactions. These are duets; one quite fanciful interpretation unfolds like a stretchy, twisting tango. If I could have anything reconsidered about Dapline!, it would be its duration. Portions of it seem unnecessarily repetitious and drawn out. Rounding out the program, it makes for a long evening. But this important work is given magnificent and affecting performances by its dancers--Brian Henry, Andre Cole, Johnnie Mercer, Malcolm McMichael, TJ Jamez and Stephen Galberth.

Five on the Black Hand Side/Dapline! continues this evening with guest artists Candace Thompson/Nehemoyia Young and University Settlement's New Youth Movement Collective (NYMC). On Saturday evening, the series concludes with Laurie M. Taylor/SOULMOVEMENT and Hamilton and Baptiste's Evil Nigger (Part 2). Both programs include performances of Dapline!, not to be missed.

For information and tickets for tonight and tomorrow's performances, both at 8pm, click here.

Speyer Hall
University Settlement
184 Eldridge Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)