“One of the things the lockdown has taught me is that creativity can’t be quarantined.”
Dancer, choreographer and performance artist Shamel Pitts and his Brooklyn-based arts collective TRIBE is a 92Y Harkness Dance Center Artist in Residence for 2020/21. We talked with him about his new digital art experience Black Hole 360°, how a dynamic, movement-based global artist has dealt with the stillness of quarantine, and how that’s making its way into his art.
Black Hole is a stunning work on stage, and already a multidisciplinary one involving dance, projections and more. What made you want to develop it into a virtual reality piece?
TRIBE is a collective of collaborators, each of us multi-skilled, working in a platform that allows us to flex and try out our multiple skills. Black Hole 360° grew out of my choreography for the live performance work and is centered on a photography series shot in Australia when we were performing there just before the pandemic. The images are by my longtime collaborator, Israeli photographer Alex Apt. Alex is interested in “human nature” – the human body and its relationship to natural landscapes. This is captured in his extraordinary photographs shot against South Australia’s huge rock formations, gold sand and water. Black Hole also has a lot to do with both what I call the colorfulness within Blackness and the power of three – the connection of three people, in this case three artists from the African diaspora – who together create a larger sense of being. These images capture that.
The video art project was conceived at a time when neither live performance nor a physical exhibit of these photographs was possible. Black Hole 360° presents them in a 3D imaginary cosmos developed by animator and designer Lucca Del Carlo, creating an immersive digital experience and giving Black Hole and its performers – myself, Mirelle Martins and Tushrik Fredericks – an interaction beyond the conventional space of the stage.
Experiencing Black Hole 360° feels a bit like walking through a gallery, where the viewer decides when to pause, how long to look at/reflect on an image, which ones to return to, etc., but the physical space is a screen. What do you hope viewers experience when interacting with it?
In this work, the audience is the “player.” We’ve created a landscape for the player to dive into – they have the agency to decide how long they’d like to engage with the work. In this digital era, there is so much fast-paced content – images every second, we’re all constantly scrolling – we thought it important for people to be able to slow down and zoom in. I love going to museums and sitting alone with the art. Sometimes I sit for a minute, sometimes much longer. There’s a whole experience that happens between myself and the work in front of me. That’s something we’re emulating with Black Hole 360° – it really is like walking through a virtual gallery. There are just six photographs in this gallery, but if an image is worth 1000 words, hopefully six images are worth 6000! In the work I do with TRIBE we are also constantly considering the audience and viewer and the relationship between the viewer and the work. We want that relationship to be as alive and dynamic as possible. We want the audience activated, whether they’re sitting in a theater or at home in front of a screen.
You were named a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow in early April, just weeks after the world went into lockdown. In August you and TRIBE were named a 92Y artist in residence. What has it been like to work on moving your art forward in a time of profound isolation?
It’s been wild, it’s been still, it’s been devastating, it’s been inspiring. When we went into lockdown, everything that was still supposed to happen in 2020 was no longer possible. I had no clue how I was going to move forward, and I felt very stuck. Then the fellowship was announced, and it propelled me. A few months later, the 92Y Harkness residency was announced, and it has truly been a gift. Harkness Dance Center Director Taryn Kaschock Russell is incredibly innovative, generous and sensitive. She has not only been a champion of my work and TRIBE’s work, but has helped us navigate through this unexpected year, nurturing what became Black Hole 360°. So even as I stayed at home, I felt I now had fuel to continue to find creative ways to continue to share art.
There was something, too, that I found really interesting during lockdown – this intersection between solitude, creativity and solidarity. Dealing at once with this state of aloneness, and the loss of community and performances and touring and gathering, also led me toward self-care, self-responsibility and also responsibility toward my non-profit. How am I going to take care of the artists I value so much? How can I take care of them at a time when there’s no work? The fellowship and my 92Y residency helped with that, and I began to envision new projects. Black Hole 360° was conceived during the lockdown.
What does the 92Y residency involve, and what does it enable in developing and showcasing your work?
I’m hoping to build additional new works in the second half of the residency. We were also able to mount an amazing series of virtual 92Y conversations with four of TRIBE’s artistic collaborators from Israel, South Africa, Brazil and Brooklyn about how they create their artmaking experiences. And I’ll be teaching virtual dance classes in Gaga, the movement language developed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. The residency has provided an extraordinary opportunity.
The performing arts – and performing artists – have suffered tremendously during the pandemic. How can dance help the world heal, and what do you see as the positive things that might emerge once this chapter is behind us?
One of the things the lockdown has taught me is that creativity can’t be quarantined. It’s something we carry with us – ideas, creativity, the need to share art as an example to humanity. Dance is forever. Dance is something that has always been and will always be. People will always come together to dance because it allows our souls to speak and fly and transcend and fill in the blanks where words can’t. The capacity of movement and dance to heal is enormous.
Black Hole 360° premieres Saturday, February 27 at 12 PM ET.