Malik Nashad Sharpe

Residency Project Notes:

During this residency, I will work on the structuring of some potential narratives for my newest work, $elfie$, and generate final aspects of material. As I enter an integral phase in making the work, I am to understand the potential of the material I’ve made more fully through this residency, and how different things live next to, alongside, overlapped, superimposed, or underneath one another. This is the most crucial part of my research: conferring meanings created in between disparate material.

$elfie$ will premiere at Fierce Festival in October. It is my most ambitious work to date. The piece uses choreography as a net to explore the relationships between allostatic load (the wear and tear of the body due to constant stress), internet aesthetics and the vaporwave critique (an internet aesthetics reneging the images of 80’s multicultural consumerism into anti-capitalist critique), gay “agendas”, the extremes of today’s violences, gender nonconformity, post-nationalist desire, pluralism, and an aesthetics of pro-Blackness and pro-Queerness, amongst many other named and unnameable things.

About Malik Nashad Sharpe/Marikiscrycrycry:

I’M MALIK NASHAD SHARPE AND I MAKE PERFORMANCES THAT ARE EMOTIONAL CHOREOGRAPHIES AND THINGS ALREADY. I MAKE WORK UNDER MY PERFORMANCE ALIAS MARIKISCRYCRCRY, THREE CRIES LIKE THREE CHEERS–THREE CHEERS FOR BEING CONFLICTUAL, SAD, DREAMY, ALOOF, UNABRIDGED, TRAGIC, AND GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY. THREE ESSENTIAL CHEERS FOR THE DISPLACED AND ALIENATED QUEER BLACK BOY. THAT SAID, MY WORK EXISTS AT THE NEXUS OF QUEERNESS AND BLACKNESS, WHILE I THINK ABOUT THE PRODUCTION OF AESTHETICS AROUND VIOLENCE, ALLOSTATIC LOAD, DESIRE, ALIENATION, AND THE INTERNET. I MAKE WORK FROM MY GUT AND I MAKE WORK THAT TRIES TO MOVE PEOPLE. I AM ALSO TRYING TO PRODUCE CHOREOGRAPHIC MATERIAL THAT RESISTS THE TEMPTATION TO PACKAGE ITSELF INTO NEAT PACKAGES FOR CONSUMPTION SINCE MY PAINS ARE NOT UP FOR SALE. I WANT IT TO UNRAVEL, LIKE I AM UNRAVELLED. I WANT IT TO DESTROY AND DISARM SYSTEMS OF HATE BY ALLOWING SOCIETIES IMPRINT ON ME TO BE SEEN, AND FOR ALL THAT IT IS WORTH. TODAY IS VIOLENT. I AM GOING TO RESITUATE WHAT CRYING IS ALL ABOUT.

In Residence:

w/c 21 August

Open Studio:

Research Studio
26 August, 1pm-5pm
RSVP HERE