Comments on a Performance by Peter Sparling

Shamel Pitts/Tribe: BLACK HOLE: Trilogy and Triathlon

Power Center for the Performing Arts, Ann Arbor, MI

March 14 & 15, 2025

Shamel Pitts and dancers performed an impressive feat of physical endurance and displayed extraordinary abilities to shape-shift into bronze-like sculpture in motion. Like moving Giacometti sculptures, African totems come to life, or animated Gumby dolls in extremis, their attenuated bodies evoked a small tribe of survivors enduring a darkened climate with a shifting gravitational pull, causing their movement to appear as if they were moving against atmospheric resistance or in defiance of it. Occasionally, they would break through into a thumping “rave” of liberation and freedom or of desperate revelry. A large piece of reflective fabric offered both a place of hiding or disappearance, a dramatic cloak to be worn or a turbulent cloud to be whipped about as a backdrop to the other dancers’ gyrations and slow morphings.

Lighting effects provide the illusion of an aurora borealis or celestial storm threatening to swallow them up. After a few false endings, (the three return downstage to disappear under the same fabric they crawled or evolved out of at the beginning, but no, it is not the end!), the trio is sucked up in a simulated black hole as it retreats upstage center and is swallowed into blackness.

Looking at the work through the lens of both dancer/choreographer and filmmaker, I imagined the creation of the work as if the choreographer began with a solo demonstrating the commanding facility of his long, wiry body to assume any shape and extend his reach into seeming infinity. (The influence of his “Gaga” training with Ohad Naharin is obvious here). He then cloned himself into a trio of slow processionals and Pilobolus-like configurations, diversified the voices by assigning a few “arias” or solos, and mapped a progression or migration lasting over an hour. He filmed it, then added various effects like "dark side of the moon", "glow", "northern lights" or Star Wars spaceship” to the entire edit. He then gave the video to a lighting designer and asked that the effects be replicated for the stage.

So much for projecting my own imagined scenario. Pitts’s work remains a mysterious universe of endless night and three survivors at some evolutionary crossroads. Is it post-apocalyptic or primal, or both? Much of the expressive potential of the performers and their highly articulated movements was blurred, made less legible and therefore diminished in power with the “through a glass darkly” effect. It generalized the action into an extended metaphor, depersonalizing it to perhaps allow for the viewer to imagine his own meanings re. survival and endurance in a black hole. Beyond a phenomenon of astrophysics, the black hole could refer to or BE the condition of living as a black person within a world of overwhelming racism, or a post-existentialist confrontation of enduring in the void of a spiritual or cosmic nothingness, or of admitting to being powerless in a realm of awesome powers greater than human intervention. What is left once humans exhaust their delusional acts of control of nature, leaving only the inevitable behaviors of an indifferent universe to swallow them up?

Oracles in motion. Cosmic Mysteries. Shadow plays. Cinematic animations. African American migrations and crossings.  Doomsday prophesies. Grand metaphors…

I will admit to having given up on reading program notes or artist’s statements before seeing a work, whether on stage or in an art gallery. Is this an assumed privilege of an arrogant white man and jaded dancegoer who thinks he knows it all, or the attempt to assume an innocent eye for maximum impact, to “read” the artist for his or her purest powers of generating kinesthetic empathy via a unique alchemy of the visual and the visceral, unfiltered by theoretical jargon? How important is it for me to know the intention of the creator? How important is it to the artist that the viewer read their remarks before the performance? Or would the artist prefer not to provide such a statement of intention to a presenter for purposes of marketing, the presenter’s educational mission, and its own section in the program? Does a work of art require an interpretation, an account of its process of creation, a contextualization in terms of issues it might address: cultural, racial, gender, political, philosophical or otherwise? Would I understand or appreciate the work better were I to frame it as an example of “Afro-Futurist” art? Is the artist a member of that “movement”, preaching its gospel? In a world charged with issues and conditions that prick our personal and collective consciences and provoke passionate responses, why shouldn’t the artist be at the forefront of such responsiveness? Can an artist merely paint a picture for canvas, stage or screen in some state of assumed innocence (and/or entitlement), and let the audience interpret it as they will? Should we not embrace a humanly crafted work of great beauty and awe whenever and wherever we can get it, letting go of the need to mine for meanings? Or does the impending darkness threatening our world order and very existence demand we artists take a stand and boldly declare our intentions to our audiences?

Perhaps I should have read the program. But unfortunately, I thought I did the right thing by leaving it in the reuse/recycle box as I departed the theater. I could always go online. Perhaps I owe it to Shamel Pitts to read “about” his work, although I’d like to believe he said it all in the work itself. It certainly made its own indelible impression.

Peter Sparling is Rudolf Arnheim Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Dance at University of Michigan. A graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and The Juilliard School, Sparling danced with the companies of José Limón and Martha Graham and directed Peter Sparling Dance Company. His videos have been screened globally, including festivals in New York City, Lisbon, and Paris. He is a published poet/essayist and has shown his paintings in numerous solo and group  exhibits.