The Brooklyn Rail

Originally from New York, Malik Nashad Sharpe is an artist and choreographer now based in London, working across theater, performance, fashion, music, and dance under the alias Marikiscrycrycry. His latest solo work, Goner, mines the genre of horror to question the conditions, pressures, and expectations that shape the performing body along lines of race, sexuality, and commodification. Goner tours to Abrons Art Center in September. I interviewed Malik in London about his influences, his attachments to horror, and about whether the theater is also a prison.

George Kan (Rail): You’re originally from New York, but this will be your first solo show in the city. Growing up, what was your first experience of dance in New York?

Malik Nashad Sharpe: Everything on Broadway, musical theater… that’s actually my first training. Which is… surprising! [Laughs] But also, once people know that, then you can start to see my approach to performativity, entertainment…

Rail: Theatricality…?

Sharpe: Theatricality. Drama. These are things I’ve never shied away from. And it’s because of my introduction to dancing, tap…

Rail: Who took you to Broadway?

Sharpe: All the stuff I learned about dance early on was from school. I ate up everything available in the public school system. My family would never go to Broadway; we would never go to the museum to see art. Not once in my life. [Laughs] This is not their world.

Rail: Did you go to clubs?

Sharpe: I was going to a lot of illegal things… When I was in high school, Brooklyn was more lawless and haphazardly put together than now. Especially in Williamsburg. I was going to all these indie shows, punk shows in warehouses. Those spaces were super influential to me. Like, illicit spaces, in-between spaces.

Rail: I’m thinking about these early queer spaces: the less-than-legal places, but also maybe the Broadway tap dancing.

Sharpe: Oh yeah, one hundred percent. I was always kind of a rebel. In middle school we had this clique of, er, misfits? At that time, it was kind of like the re-emergence of emo culture. MySpace. Scene kids. I feel like the queerness really started there. It being ok to look different, flamboyant.

Rail: When skinny jeans were a thing.

Sharpe: Skinny jeans, big hair, dyed hair. I remember when I dyed my hair everyone was like, “What?!” This was in Queens [Laughs]—very far-flung Queens—beyond the subway. The schools I went to until my second high school were quite impoverished, so the way music and dance functioned was more like an outlet for kids who maybe didn’t have anywhere else to go after school. My school would put on musicals with three hundred people. It was kind of wild. I was always cast in some dancing role. I didn’t usually get a lead.

Rail: What made you pursue it further?

Sharpe: I went to a university in Massachusetts to study chemistry and art history. And, literally after the first term I dropped out of art history and, on the sly, took a dance class.

Rail: While still doing the degree in chemistry?

Sharpe: Yep. I was really trying to be a doctor. [Laughs] Because this like, immigrant family background had this pressure to do a professional thing. And of course, the guilt… I had to come out as a dancer. It was harder to come out as that than to come out as queer, actually. Because they don’t, it’s not… I don’t know what to call it.

Rail: A different world?

Sharpe: It’s just a different world. They’re supportive of me now, but it’s only because I’ve had success. I had a full scholarship at uni, and it’s also in the middle of fucking nowhere so there was nothing to do. So you really get deep into stuff. I was just consuming everything. I would be going to New York every weekend to see shows, taking that three-hour bus. Taking workshops at Movement Research…

Rail: You’re so busy right now. You’re on a rise—

Sharpe: Yeah, yeah, “I’m having a moment.”

Rail: [Laughs] Right. You’re “having a moment” …and I’m starting to see the seeds of that work ethic.

Sharpe: Yeah, my family was ruthless about my schooling. I made the move to London to train at the conservatoire. You learn something about each different field’s approach. How theater approaches narrative, how they think about time. They don’t waste no time in the theater. Whereas in dance, I’ve seen so many choreographies where there’s ten minutes of you wondering what’s going on. In theater you can never get away with that. And that’s fine, but to know the conventions of all these things gives me skills to play with.

Rail: In Goner you’re dealing with questions of Blackness and queerness. How do you think these elements might land differently with different international audiences?

Sharpe: I mean that’s the thing I’m most concerned about. I try not to be super didactic about my approaches to race, or sexuality, or class. For me these are inherent things. This is the vessel where it happens—here—the body. It’s already there. Six, seven, eight years ago I was trying to get people to see my work as about queerness or the Black experience. But the trap was that you become a representation for those things—which is problematic because there’s no singular representation for them. Actually, being Black and queer is so in the work, you couldn’t take those out of the work if you wanted to. I always prefer complexity. Choreography is a place where you can welcome conflict.

Rail: And ambiguity?

Sharpe: And ambiguity and ambivalence… I wanna talk about the full things I have experienced—not just the ones the market demands. There was a moment when all the programs were doing seasons on “Black Joy” and I was like, urgh, just so annoyed that people are putting thoughts around what I can say. It just felt really sinister. What’s actually going on here? I’m trying to make work that makes people think about how they even designate me as what I am. That for me is more exciting.

Rail: The show’s been around for a year already. Has it changed in that time?

Sharpe: Yeah. It’s changed a lot.

Rail: How has it changed?

Sharpe: You learn a lot about a work when you put it in front of an audience. I don’t have a lot of solo choreographic models out there working with horror. With Goner, if I’m going to translate this experimentation with horror, I’ve got to work with story. But since I’ve never done that, I had to kinda like keep throwing that at the wall. I worked with a dramaturg, Jay Miller from The Yard. He’s incredible. He has a way of cutting through the riff-raff. There’s this monologue that was very poetic but at the end there’s no clarity on anything. That’s fine. But if I wanted to hook everyone onto this horror journey, I needed to answer the question: “Who am I?” The character was like half me, half some other thing.

Rail: And who is it now?

Sharpe: Now it’s really me. Now the show is actually scary. In addition to the traditional jump scares, it’s also really unnerving because there’s the blur between reality and fiction.

Rail: Would you say it’s autobiographical?

Sharpe: It’s fiction, but you’d think it’s real. I say things that are very believable and I talk about things that are close to me. So I talk about living in Brixton, I say my name is Malik, but I contrive it just a little bit.

Rail: Would you say there’s more of you in this show than in your other work previously?

Sharpe: A hundred percent. I try not to, like—

Rail: Put too much of yourself in there?

Sharpe: Yeah… I dunno. I don’t know what I’m afraid of. I don’t know if it’s a fear: why I’m so reticent to do anything related to my biography. But I think it’s a weird form of protection. I don’t want people to see me as a victim. I guess I’m just interested in fantasy too much. Those things, the traumas of my life will be in the work anyway. They’re in the aesthetics. They’re in the choices I make. I’m like a jokester, you know, I like to pull the rug out from under the audience. Or I know they’ll feel bad for me—and I don’t want that.

Rail: In typical horror you have the monstrous outsider, who’s often racialized or queered, but also the—I don’t know whether it’s the “victim”—but you have the settled, secure, often middle-class, home-owning idyl that’s threatened. And I was wondering, in Goner, which of those positions are you? Or are you both?

Sharpe: I think by the end you realize that, yeah, I’m probably both. I think the lasting question of Goner is “Can we redeem irredeemable people? Can we have empathy for people who do bad things?” I’m being subject to something but also I’ve done something really horrible. The work is called Goner—a figure which is doomed. I’m trying to reinvigorate the agency for the figure who’s doomed.

Rail: Can you say what the character is subjected by?

Sharpe: It’s a bit of a question. At some point it becomes clear the stage is actually a prison. There’s some element of torture happening—someone else is doing it to me. You don’t see them. But, at the end, it’s the audience. We all have a role in creating monsters. But we live in a time when we’re not really ready to take responsibility for that and actually what we do is try to erase monsters out of our view. But you can’t do that.

Rail: I’m thinking about how, in horror, the othered monster is shaped by the normative world’s perception of them. This view of the theater reminds me of the demand made to the marginalized to perform, and perform again, in our capitalist cultural economy.

Sharpe: These are the investments I’m making in talking about race, for example. Because you’ll sit and listen to what I’m saying in here but the minute something happens outside of this space… the empathy toward Blackness is less out there.

Rail: Do you have an imagined race of the show’s audience?

Sharpe: When in London, I know—vaguely—what the audience can be. Same thing in Sweden, I work there all the time. Interestingly, I can’t really see… I start the show with my back to the audience for like fifteen minutes. The house lights are on so everyone can see everyone—the choreography puts it all on display. You know I’ve been told, even at the ICA, some Black audience members are watching how other audience members are consuming what I’m doing. When I was in Denmark, someone said that these mixed-race Black people were like “Oh, we feel like the work is not really for Black people.” But the naiveté of that position is that you think Black people cannot oppress other Black people and that is fucked. Often times, the person that’s doing the oppressing looks just like the person they’re oppressing—and that’s the kind of smoke and mirrors of this fucking moment. And I’m like: let’s get into it. No easy answers anymore.

Rail: I’m thinking about the theater and the prison… I remember when we met at the panel organized by Blanca Ulloa, you mentioned you were taking inspiration from the Jordan Peele films, and Amber Musser responded, mentioning her recent book, Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined. She writes about Us, and the two girls simultaneously dancing in the final flashback scene—which is a dance in a prison. She sees this as the imprisoned Red seeking confirmation of her subjectivity/agency from Adelaide, through this dancing, but punished in that searching/dancing.

Sharpe: It’s like a mirror. And, inevitably, dance is a mirror. Dance that happens on stage, more often than not, is a reflection of the society that’s looking right back at it. This is something I have talked about with a lot of my friends who are also performers who are Black. The stage is the only place where people will take what you say with some degree of seriousness or hear you out and hold your complexity.

Rail: I didn’t expect you to go in that direction, because you were setting up how this process of understanding that happens through reflection in the theater is fucked. But you’re saying, at the same time, you seek something there.

Sharpe: Oh, its super fucked up. And to kick it down one more layer of fucked-up-ness, unfortunately it’s human nature. Babies are looking at you and how your mouth moves, and doing the same thing to learn how to talk. You know what I mean? There’s something about human nature and reflectiveness that sets up the possibility of this. [Laughs] It’s weird. The stage is a weird place. If the theater is part of the society that comes into the room then, nine times out of ten, I know something about what’s coming into the room. Not everyone in society is in there, but there’s some kind of key denominator. Always.

Rail: You mentioned the audience viewing each other…

Sharpe: It’s deliberate. I built it that way. The repetition of the things I do allows people to start to look around. I come in there shaking my ass and everyone’s like “yesss” and after five minutes I still haven’t turned around. These Black girls were talking to me after my show and they saw all these white guys literally on their phones zooming in on my ass. And also, I’m not a victim of that. I’m doing that. I’m calling into question these power dynamics… I don’t show my face. It’s all about the back, it’s all about the ass, it’s all about the legs, it’s all about the splits. I’m Caribbean; the work is utilizing some sonic and movement language from my culture—even though I’m diasporic in my culture—I’m trying to bring up the objectification of Caribbean culture and the projection of sexuality onto Caribbean culture. The audience has some kind of relationship to me. The conditions that have arisen that make people killers—it starts when I come on.

Rail: You’re implicating the audience in the context from which the show’s violence emerges.

Sharpe: And you’ll see it. I just think: what does that say about mirroring and reflection? It’s the dancing that does that. Because it’s very repetitive. And a very set part of the show.

Rail: There’s something almost clinical in this set-up/experiment—between this choreographic frame and the dance style.

Sharpe: Yeah, yeah, yeah—it’s trying to imbue it with a formal… Its already formal, right? I’m always going to battle its deservedness on stage. All these little ways I’ve pointed to dehumanization, othering… it’s personal. Because it’s also what I’ve witnessed my whole life being part of the Caribbean diaspora here and in the US. Jordan Peele is really inspiring because, for the first time, I saw someone using horror to investigate what it is to be marginalized. Taking those formal things and then taking what’s in society and putting them together. [Pauses] The show is also entertaining…

Rail: And that takes you back to your Broadway beginnings.

Sharpe: Yeah, we gotta sell these tickets! [Laughs] I had an English professor who was like “If you can’t get these ideas across to someone who’s not read all the texts, you haven’t done it.” And I take that advice for every show I make. My personal trainer from the gym came. [Laughs] He brought the whole gym. I was like, “I don’t know if this is the right show for that introduction.” But they loved it. That’s what you want, right? [Laughs] And I was also like: wow, my trainer is about to watch me do the gayest show on Earth. Gosh.

Rail: Talk about having diverse audiences.

Sharpe: Yeah. People’s mothers are in here. I just want [the audience] to be able to get something from it.

Rail: You don’t want people to feel alienated.

Sharpe: No, yeah, no, no… Unless I really want to do that. [Laughs]