The Brooklyn Rail

Grief can be personal, polarizing, and isolating. One need not look further than our recent pandemics and ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, to see how death and its specter can divide. Even within smaller groups of people like families, personal relationships rule how the dead are memorialized and how their absence is mourned. In short, loss is not usually a moment of easy consensus.

And yet, movement-based performance artist mayfield brooks posits that the labor of grieving has the potential to invite a deep unity. In Wail-Fall—an activation of their installation Wail Room at Performance Space New York—brooks aims to break down the walls of grief so that we may meet each other in an ephemeral place where decomposition is not an end, but rather like compost, can herald a new beginning.

The theater of Performance Space New York is dark with risers set in the center of the large open space. The sound of brooks’s weeping and whale whistles accompany me as I try to get my bearings. White curtains are draped throughout, some with projections of open water rippling over their folds. Blue neon tubes flicker intermittently in the windows, but most of the dim, prismatic lighting emanates from the projectors. A few shallow pools lined with tinfoil reflect light and seem to foreshadow a future event. I make my way past a chamomile tea station, through the scattering of bean bags, to a cross-legged seat on a plush rug on the risers.

I settle into reading the “Whale Death Archive, New York and New Jersey 2022–2023,” a scrolling obituary of the many mammals lost to blunt force trauma and dubious, unknown causes. The sounds of the voices surrounding me range from high pitched calls to lower, growl-like responses. The environment of waves, distorted text, folded fabric, modulating cries, scattered blue light, and creases in the foil conspire to form a feeling of transposition. A small, folded zine handed out with the program upon entering the installation invites me “to open my heart / touch the water.” brooks’s text implies the slippage of these conditions is meant to help me reckon with my own grief in the space of the installation. However, there are too many specific elements present for me to even begin to conjure any personal losses. But as I let the conditions wash over me and the room begins to fill, with the audience lounging on cushions facing all directions, the mood is ripe for the enigmatic entrance of brooks’s and performer Camilo Restrepo’s real and metaphorical bodies.

A singular torso inches out from under a corner of a curtain to the strange scraping and croaking sounds of Dorothy Carlos’s electronic cello. The bare shoulders belong to brooks. Their scapulae chase each other around undulating ribs as they advance slowly on their knees, head on the ground, dragging a train of white fabric. In a motif that evokes fins or wings or a darker, carceral allusion to having wrists cuffed, their arms are bent behind their back, thumbs on articulating spine.

brooks calls their interdisciplinary dance methodology Improvising While Black. Their teaching and performing practices are concerned with the “decomposed matter of Black life.” Whale Fall, a 2021 video piece created in Abrons Art Center, preceded Wail-Fall. In that digital work, brooks explored similarities between the whale body and the Black body, alone in a stripped-down theater. Wail-Fall extends these sympathies, this time, in community.

After a long, slow journey, brooks links up with Restrepo, who I can now see was entering in a similar fashion from a different direction. The pair nuzzle and embrace and twist out of their fabric, intertwined creatures making their way toward a pool. Restrepo rolls backward into the water; brooks dons a shimmering slip dress, steps into another pool, and grabs a mic. brooks dedicates this grieving time to her absent father, teasing out complex ideas of how to reconcile positive memories with a painful reality. Traveling back to their fourteen-year-old self in church, brooks sings “Tomorrow,” from The Winans, their voice a rich salve probing a wound.

Movement and sound continue to waver between species. Restrepo’s hips trace impossible arcs in the air above the water; brooks climbs up to a platform on the risers near Carlos, gurgling and splashing water near a low mic. Their arms float up and thrash down like leviathans at play. The soundscape free associates: the cello starts to resemble funereal bagpipes; a children’s chorus comes into focus from faraway; brooks’s dry heaves escalate until their retching transforms into an operatic lamentation emanating from a body no longer visible.

In a surreal and abrupt shift, this scene gives way to the re-emergence of brooks and Restrepo in white jumpsuits, picking the audience up out of their seats to the upbeat Colombian folk music of Ruca y El Quinde de Barbacoas. But the hands extended are not simply for a social dance, they are an invitation to join brooks’s pod. As Carlos recites brooks’s “pod manifesto”—which includes the refrain “some of us are loved / some of us are shy / some of us are weapons / some of us are wise”—the practice of grief digests into resistance and social justice. We are encouraged to linger over and repeat the final lines “we are many” and “we are one.”

Program text and subtext reinforce the idea that Wail-Fall “is not about performing grief.” But it is difficult to separate the inherently performative elements of the grief labor. After all, sharing grief necessitates expression. Can any collective grieving process be divorced fully from performance? brooks spent several hours a day grieving in the Wail Room prior to the activation. Ultimately, it is impossible to cover such vast emotional ground without the workly collage of projection, singing, cello playing, storytelling, dancing, and a zine of evocative images of brooks and whales, notes, quotes, a manifesto, and Saidiya Hartman’s “Notation: Cycles of Accumulation and Dispossession.”

Even though I was unable to manufacture my own catharsis that evening, the connective tissue underpinning brooks’s practice was provocative enough to circulate in my thoughts and journal entries many days past the experience as I wondered about the dedication, of time and energy, this labor demands. There is no denying this work is needed now: to be in communion with the natural world and buoyed by one another as we face so much violence, trauma, and loss of life.