fly baby fly

Malcolm-x Betts

Presented by Mabou Mines

#NYC-Based Artist, #70 Minutes or Less, #In Motion, #UTR Alumni

fly baby fly is a dance by choreographer and visual artist Malcolm-x Betts, created with dancer Molly Lieber and sound designer GENG PTP. The work’s origins reside partly in Betts’s childhood loss of his cousin Michael to AIDS, though the work neither explicitly illustrates nor explains that history. Instead, memory enters the dance as atmosphere, weight, rhythm: a knowledge the body carries before language can name it. Across a landscape of sacred objects, vibrating sound and charged physical encounter, two bodies test the gravitational pull of attachment. They brace, yield, collide, suspend. Rage flashes into ecstasy, tenderness into fatigue, grief into propulsion. Movement becomes both psychic event and embodied repository, holding private loss alongside the larger discourse that haunts non-dancing genderqueer bodies. Part ritual, part experiment, part physical prayer, fly baby fly inhabits a strange territory where mourning becomes desire and exhaustion produces another possibility for motion. The body is a burden, witness, archive and perhaps an instrument of transcendence. Under the immense gravity of what has been lost, two bodies rehearse the impossible: how to become light enough to transcend reality and, ultimately, fly.

“A shimmering, hammering, transcendent memorial to life”
– fjord