August 2023
Dansehallerne x Betty is a brilliant, ongoing collaboration between Dansehallerne and Betty Nansen Teatret that revolves around our shared passion for dance and choreography. With the program, we intend to challenge preconceptions with humor, provocation, and diverse representation. Audiences should expect wild and beautiful performances created by some of the strongest emerging + well-established artists from home and abroad. The cutting-edge program is topped up with talks and DJs + good company in the bar.
A warm welcome,
Elisa Kragerup Artistic Director, Betty Nansen Teatret Danjel Andersson Director, Dansehallerne
By Marikiscrycrycry
The “goner” is someone who is doomed with no chance of survival – bound to death, a lost and hopeless case.
This work follows this figure on a sensuous, suspense-filled, and fearsome choreographic journey into the psychological depths of the goner’s horror. Lightly touching on the topics of abuse, Caribbean migration, alienation, belonging, addiction, and violence, GONER is utilising the formal tools of solo authorship and the aesthetics of horror to create radical visual culture from the marginalised perspective, and
to tease out and establish a Black tradition of horror for the live context. How do we look at culturally specific narratives against a backdrop of thrilling, bloody, and psychological horror?
Who knows but there will be blood Dive into Marikiscrycrycry’s own thoughts about GONER in the article ”Is Marikiscrycrycry... a goner?” by Georgia Howlett, published in Springback Magazine on 23 May 2023. You’ll find the article at the end of the program.
Choreography
Musical Direction
Set Design
Lighting Design
Costume Design
Production Manager
Project Producers
Strategic Producers
Music Composition and Sound Design
Rehearsal Direction
Hair
Featuring music by Voiceover
Text Consultancy
Promotional Images
Promotional Styling
Trailer/Short Film
Trailer/Image Movement Direction
Trailer Talent
Malik Nashad Sharpe
Tabitha Thorlu-Bengura
Felix Villiers
Barnaby Booth
Erik Annerborn
James Dawson
Michael Kitchin
Eva Steen Nordhagen
The Uncultured
Luke Blair
Blue Makwana
ManWigs
Arif Cooper (R.I.P.)
De Schuurman
Poundshoppe
Don Sinini
OBOBOB
Travis Alabanza
Ralf Hersborg
HASZNAT*
Sinisa
Ethan Samuel Jacobs
Isabelle Gzowski
Gabriel Chen
Chloe Filani
Iman Villaruel
Shemi Cudjoe
Trailer Sound
‘Body of Carbon’
by Croation Amor and
Varg2TM courtesy of Posh Isolation
FUNDERS/SUPPORTERS
Co-commissioned by The Yard Theatre (UK), Dansehallerne (DK), MDT (SK), Cambridge Junction (UK) with support from Stobbs New Ideas Fund.
Additional Support by Fest en Fest (UK), The Place (UK), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s Creative Exchange Lab with lead support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (USA), Toronto Community Love-in (CA), My Wild Flag (SK), Sadler’s Wells (UK), Watermans Arts Centre (UK), Caldera Arts Centre (USA), New Expressive Works (USA) and Live Art Development Agency (UK). Created using public funds from Arts Council England.
Malik Nashad Sharpe is an award-winning choreographer and movement director known for his provocative and formally engaging performance works that address themes of violence, alienation, horror, melancholia, and the horizon. He frequently choreographs underneath his alias, Marikiscrycrycry.
He has received commissions and shown his work at venues and festivals across the U.K., Europe, and Canada, and is currently an Associate Artist at The Place and a studio resident of Somerset House Studios. He has held artistic residencies at Sadlers Wells, Barbican, Performance Situation Room, Dance4, Duckie, and Tate Modern.
He holds a BA in Experimental Dance with highest honours from Williams College and a certificate in Contemporary Dance from Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Music and Dance, where he won the Simone Michele Prize for Outstanding Choreography.
In 2019, he was named a Rising Star in Dance by Attitude Magazine and in 2022, he was featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his unique and pervasive choreographic achievements.
He currently lives in London and is a guest professor in dance and performance at the Stockholm University of Arts in Sweden.
Article about GONER by
Georgia HowlettPublished in Springback Magazine, 23 May 2023
Both sides of the stage: audience member Georgia Howlett talks with creator and performer Malik Nashad Sharpe about their show Goner
Marikiscrycrycry is the alias of Malik Nashad Sharpe (he/they), an artist project that interrogates the downtrodden and dehumanising realities of Blackness. ‘What makes a monster?’ is the question begged by Marikiscrycrycry’s first solo in 7 years, Goner. Featured on the 2020 Forbes ‘30 under 30’ list for their pervasive choreographic achievements, Sharpe has presented work across the UK, Europe and Canada, engaging audiences with a persistent, provocative approach towards themes of violence and alienation. I spoke to Sharpe shortly after the piece premiered at NOW, a yearly festival at east London’s Yard Theatre, known for championing the alternative. The answer? Watching Goner is to be positioned defencelessly as the perpetrator of a crime; nobody walks away innocent.
Goner occupies the hostile, concrete amphitheatre, bare except for the shower
with semiopaque plastic walls (later, it becomes a torture chamber, smeared with blood). Sharpe enters with a bounce, summoned by looping dancehall beats. Bare back turned defiantly, we’re forced to focus on the relentless sway, pulse and twerk of his hips, and a tail-like braid that lethally swings. Now and then, he slides inch by inch into side splits, sheen developing on his shoulders. Erotic as it can be in the absence of passion. After 15 minutes, just when observation becomes endurance, Sharpe – insert jump-scare – swivels round in sudden spotlight and silence, blood dripping from his mouth.
Horror, Sharpe tells me, has been their primary creative outlet for dealing with their own experiences for some time, despite only acknowledging this recently. Can horror be done live? Goner frequently plays into reflexes to utilise shock factor, for example when a repeated choreographic sequence builds tension towards
a sudden violent image: neck-breaking twitches under flashing lights, followed by a gunshot. Such tropes trigger similar reactions onstage as they do on screen, over as quickly as they started, leaving little more than the jitters. Regardless, these simplistic devices deserve their place amongst dense themes. ‘I don’t want to bewilder audiences,’ Sharpe explains. ‘sometimes, it is purely about accessibility.
In Goner, audience and performer are both shackled, the former prevented from pleading innocent, the latter at the mercy of a faceless voiceover. Sharpe’s centre-stage prison shower enhances the trauma of entrapment, aiming to ‘enclose space within space’. By casting light on its translucent walls, Sharpe’s form becomes uncertain, their lethargic movements blurred. The voiceover then
But there is a deeper, lasting horror behind Sharpe’s choices. Goner mournfully and violently confronts the sinister themes within marginalisation. At one point, Sharpe confronts the audience, speaking directly to them from ‘in here’ – a reference to the cage-like structure, but to emotional imprisonment too. Goner positions the audience as the perpetrator, and the genre of horror, with its associated violence, only enhances this disparity of power. The theatre becomes a toxic magnification of the perpetual ‘us/them’ mindset – another deliberate artistic choice: ‘We are in a moment of historical amnesia around racism. People think that because we are in 2023 and we’ve moved on from certain things and I can have a show that people come and watch, that all of the violence in society, that I face, is not in the room when we gather.’ Goner locks the audience into active rather than passive engagement, to sit with the sour taste of what is implicated: we are all a part of a society that creates monsters.
instructs Sharpe to hurl their body over and over, bloody and exhausted, clawing the plastic into shreds until they fall through; finally released from the chamber – but only by following the voice’s commands
Watching violent dance is like swallowing a hard truth. When Sharpe beats what appears to be a radio encased in bars with a club, it is uncomfortable, but such fury hasn’t cropped up from thin air. Sharpe believes that dance has an inherent positivity to it that goes unquestioned, a ‘need to be beautiful’, undoubtedly stemming from its pleasant traditions. Today, a contemporary performance is rarely just pleasant, but the term ‘beautiful’ has morphed from aesthetic to more subjective notions of impact and provocation that a piece leaves you with. Horror is a genre far removed from average perceptions of beautiful dance, but Sharpe explains that ‘Marikiscrcrycry’s entire practice has sought to understand if dance can take forms not usually seen.’
“We are all a part of a society that creates monsters”
It becomes clear that Sharpe uses horror to their advantage, mutating, embodying and destroying forms that deviate from the norm, implying how an identity ruptures beneath the load of racism. ‘Horror relies on seeing someone in an impossibly vicious situation, one they cannot even see themselves,’ Sharpe explains. In a similar way, horror is woven into the fabric of daily life for the marginalised, who encounter covert situations as pernicious reminders of discrimination. ‘Even when things seem equal, they simply aren’t.’
What of the aftermath of a piece like Goner? ‘Only after performing the piece do I realise what needs to be processed,’ says Sharpe, but he is clear about his ongoing intention to ‘rewire the social condition of Blackness for something other than tragedy’. On a practical level, he explains, rewiring means expanding possibilities for Black artists, to eat away at the sinister limitations on what they are allowed to talk about and pursue. More imaginatively, it is – as in much dark fantasy – about defying tragic realities with superhuman alternatives. After being shot down midpiece in Goner, Sharpe rises again.
Is Goner a piece of protest? Sharpe is unsure – but is certain that nobody is a neutral actor in a nameless system. When the system we inhabit is society, the art we generate is inherently political. We speak of Jordan Peele, a filmmaker who has cracked open the genre of horror to centre certain Black experiences on the big screen, exposing the lurking, unaddressed politics with cinematic tools that in themselves evoke fear.
Goner possesses defiance and grief in equal parts. Blunt scares and nuanced dread, twerking and hiding in shadows, sentimental props and spaces within spaces are patchworked to illustrate a life on the edges. However, the work is strung together by the choice to turn attention towards us. Sharpe has not only performed horror live, but exposed the horror that was already present before they even entered. Here, whether you were haunted by it or not, is the acute fear and persistent frustration that Sharpe lives with – a stage for their monsters, a space to contest injustice that is deeply ingrained, not easily resolved and frightening to its very core.
29 August
20.00
New Sh*t Vol. 7 guest curated by Escarleth Romo Pozo.
22.00
DJ Shaka Lion plays in the foyer
1 September
19:00
DJ Nico Defrost plays in the foyer
20.00
GONER created by Marikiscrycrycry
21.00
Party until midnight with DJ Nico Defrost
2 September
17.00
GONER created by Marikiscrycrycry
18.15
25 min artist talk with Marikiscrycrycry
6 September
20.00
The Juliet Duet created by Erna Ómarsdóttir and Halla Ólafsdóttir
21.30
25 min artist talk with Marikiscrycrycry
7 September
20.00
The Juliet Duet created by Erna Ómarsdóttir and Halla Ólafsdóttir
DANSEHALLERNE BETTY
CUTTING-EDGE PERFORMANCES, TALKS & MORE
WHEN 29.08–07.09.23
Edison-scenen, Edisonsvej 10, 1856 Frederiksberg
Dansehallerne x Betty is a strategic collaboration between Dansehallerne and Betty Nansen Teatret.
/ Bettynansen.dk
