fly baby fly

There was something special about how NYC dancers Dominica Greene and Malcolm-x Betts opened their shared evening of new work at Danspace Project: it began before guests arrived.

Betts was already on the floor: playing the harp, exchanging frequencies with sound designer and collaborator GENG PTP, and moved throughout the space. He adjusted the expectations and timeline for a performance, connecting wonderfully to the erupting, fly baby fly, a work dedicated to Betts’ older cousin Michael, on the first anniversary of his passing from AIDS.

There was no timeline for Betts’s emotional landscape constructed, just as there is no timeline that unfolds in the wake of grief and death. For this performance, it comes in theshape and sound of a strumming harp, shuddering and shimmying with Betts’s touch, electronic synths, beats, and an atmospheric cacophony. After putting down the harp, Betts was joined by Molly Lieber. Together they revealed and unveiled the delicate, dynamic, and never-ending path of Betts’s journey.

The movement was quirky and continuous. Their bodies jumped in and out of shapes, expanding, repeating, lunging, reaching, and contracting. But never, not even once, seemed to take a pause except when Leiber leaves and returns, to reveal a costume change ranging from a hooded sweat set, to a torn and revealing blouse and pant combo. Betts joined her, walking to the back of the space, turned away from the audience, to strip down, and reemerge with a similar, delicate wardrobe.

Leiber crawled up the stairs and a spotlight froze her in time. Betts performs a spoken word cluster that built and built until Leiber is convulsed and he screamed. The mic dropped and they both returned to a swirl of connection through the layers of PTP’s audio, actively mixed from upstage left the entire time.

A harmonious evening, Dominica Greene endlessend tackled the theme of endings and beginnings, or lack thereof, as well. Performed by Greene and Garrett Allen, and united by a fan from her family in Ghana, Greene simultaneously told the story of her summer there and connection to her family’s rhythm, as well as how time and distance restructured her sentiment of change and meaning.

Dedicated to her late grandfather, Victor A. Greene, Greene began the work with a spotlight, fan, and movement monologue. She eloquently set up a casually provocative structure with witty comedic timing, laced with the sweet heat of longing.Obsessed with its lifelike breath, she took the fan back to New York, and her heartbreak sounded like the whirring down of the family fan.

Intertwined with Allen in an amoebic back and forth, we heare Greene come to terms with a piece of life breaking down, while experiencing the wonder of finding a solution outside of typical means. On a windy day after trying to get it fixed, and on the Danspace floor, generated wind brought the blades back to life. Greene ran in circles, picking up speed and excitement, as the blades hummed and danced alongside her.

The simple black long sleeved pieces that Greene and Allen wore, extended with even longer sleeves. Impossibly long and allowed them to reach beyond themselves… endlessly, you could say. Greene’s narrative choreography illuminated solace by breathing some of your own life into something.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Emma Edy Morris