“Does anyone out there know what Afrofuturism is?” Bill T. Jones asked on Saturday night in the middle of Times Square.
Jones is, among other things, Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, an experimental performing arts center in Chelsea. In that capacity, he performed on Saturday to discuss a free outdoor performance of “The Motherboard Suite,” a movement and musical work he directed for the center’s Live Ideas Festival.
I’m not sure anyone who watched this event got a much clearer sense of Afrofuturism, but the Saturday outdoor performance certainly sparked a renewed appreciation for live ideas and live art.
This year’s theme was “Changed Worlds: Black Utopia and the Age of Acceleration”. In keeping with a technology-related theme, the five-day festival was a mix of virtual and personal symposia and performances. In a virtual segment, Reynaldo Anderson, a co-curator, generally defined Afrofuturism as “the speculative product of the thinking of people in the African diaspora”.
He spoke of visions of the future, and the festival delivered them, although it also felt very timely as the city’s performing arts scene cautiously adjusts to new opportunities at this stage of the pandemic.
“The Motherboard Suite” is itself a hybrid: a 45-minute concert by the slam poet, who became musician Saul Williams, with titles from his albums “MartyrLoserKing” (2016) and “Encrypted & Vulnerable” (2019), published by six respected choreographers were interpreted in the flesh. I’ve experienced it in three ways. I saw its premiere on Thursday at the New York Live Arts theater. I stayed at home on Friday and met him virtually. On Saturday I ventured into Times Square for the outdoor show.
The Thursday show was a milestone, the first live performance in the theater since last March.
There were about 30 of us in the audience, taking up about one-sixth of the venue’s seats. Being there felt excitingly strange and dauntingly familiar, and also excitingly familiar and dauntingly strange.
For one set, the show had an installation by Jasmine Murrell with mirrored rock and soil formations in the form of hands or giant cacti. It reminded me of a desert planet on the original Star Trek. Murrell was also responsible for the headdresses some of the choreographers wore – who, with the exception of Shamel Pitts, performed their own works (Pitts was danced by Morgan Bobrow-Williams and Maria Bauman was accompanied by Samantha Speis). The headgear was eye-catching: one like a giant brain or a large afro, another like a cubist head made from shards of records.
But those theatrical elements (including flashing and neon lights from Serena Wong) felt superficial. Williams, charismatic in his sunglasses, delivered his compositions on a rear platform (along with multi-instrumentalist Aku Orraca-Tetteh), and each choreographer recorded a song or two, mostly alone. The more conspicuous among them, especially Jasmine Hearn, caught attention, but the connections between sections and cast seemed terribly constructed and unimaginative, with ensemble pieces on the order of “Now Everyone Freezes in One Pose”. Live is not always amazing.
The virtual option came through a platform called Interspace. Each visitor is represented by a kind of mobile nameplate, an avatar that you can press with the arrow key around a 3D diagram of a theater complex. You can go to a gallery and see an extensive visual art exhibition from the Black Speculative Arts Movement. You can chat, virtually meet other visitors, start a conversation, or overhear someone else’s before and after entering the digital theater for a digital show.
Watching the show this way was like watching another video of a live performance, only the stream was half frozen for me. Especially after experiencing the flawed but real thing the night before, the virtual version felt less like a utopian taste of the future than like an already half-outdated world that we hopefully won’t have to live in.
For much of prepandemic life, life returns, as attested by the exciting and frightening crowds the size of a prepandemic in Times Square. There “The Motherboard Suite” didn’t have its own sets or lighting on Saturday. It had a superior replacement: the Blade Runner electronic billboards. Sometimes the roar of motorcycles or the drumming and chanting of Hare Krishnas accidentally sounded with the score, but the energy of the place continuously weighed on the performance.
The performance took place in a cordoned off area of Father Duffy Square. This time the choreographers did not sit up and down, but on the stage, observing and interacting with one another. And that change, along with the increase in audience (potentially large, if small in practice), changed everything. The show came to life.
Even mishaps were transformed. During Marjani Forté-Saunders’ solo, her headdress – a top hat draped in elephantine spools of cloth with a face – began to untangle. She dropped it and was freed into new powers. That accident opened connections in the choreography: the way Kayla Farrish exploded after taking off her cubist vinyl helmet, or the way Bobrow-Williams’s hands felt like he was having trouble getting himself off after taking it off for his missing giant brain to adapt to it could be without it.
Only d. Sabela Grimes seemed invigorated by his troublesome costume: a body-covering, sophisticated pony in purple and white with a ski mask framed by cowrie shells. But its popping isolations also drew a greater shamanic force from the street energy of Times Square. The show was less about cosplay and more about being together.
In a way, the elaborately costumed characters of “The Motherboard Suite” fit right in with the costumed tourist attractions of Times Square. But Williams’ sometimes profane texts – mostly words of opposition to the capitalist fantasy around him, the seductive status quo – played a much larger role than in the other, less public spaces. His final list of things to hack into (capitalism, sexuality, God) felt less like preaching to the choir. Location is important. If the show didn’t start a revolution, it was a good introduction to what New York Live Arts can be.
