Northrop Auditorium, March 2025
The audience sat on stage, surrounding a ropeless red boxing ring. As we moved to our seats, Pitts and Tushrik Fredericks, his dance partner and co-combatant, shadow-boxed and wrestled with fast movements, some smooth, some jerky, for a long stretch, never quite touching but so close as to be a sequence of abstracted ballet moves between the two men. Moving together, their legs, arms, abdomens, backs, chests, and hands intertwined but somehow always remained separated by an inch or two as they moved across the ring. This must have been more physically difficult than moves where a hand supported a partner’s leg, a back supported another’s torso.
Pitts is strong, rounded, muscled, - conventionally and undoubtedly handsome or yes, beautiful. Fredericks is skinnier, angular and his strength is more hidden. They move with enchanted control.
Ignorant of dance details, I was glad for the program’s reference to the Lindy Hop, the early 20th Century dance craze that depends on the strength and inspiration of two dancers. We could see, in this light, the history and continued beauty of American popular dance.
Pitts attributes this work to between tour visits to Brooklyn, his home, where it seemed that boxing was on TV everyday and where after being repulsed by the violence, he saw exhausted boxers collapsing in each other's arms and he then thought of male bodies, their vulnerability, and even their artistic presentation. He sought out the fights of Mohamed Ali, whose “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” he found to be a six step dance move. Late night and body-packed dance parties around the world also inspired Touch of Red. TRIBE consists of the dancers, scene designer, lighting designer and music coordinator. They performed another work at The Walker last year and will return next year for the final part of a three year collaboration of these artists and sponsors. See Pitts interviewed on The Northrup’s website.
The ten round bout never stopped as Pitts and Fredericks moved from combat to display to intimacy as abstracted house music played and blood red lighting kept eyes centered . Not ten seconds of relaxation or respite for dancers or audience.
I thought of Between the World and Me, the book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which he focuses his understanding of the story of his life on being a person with a black male body. I haven’t finished this powerful book but hope that by the end Coates will have celebrated the black male body with a portion of the joy that Pitts and Fredericks brought to the stage.
The work was exhausting, erotic, violent, entrancing, challenging, tender, beautiful.
As part of a mainly white audience, I considered how Coates might review the whole of the “exhibition” - just another version of black entertainments for white audiences? I hope not, I think Pitts dances on his own terms, gathers his own history and chooses how to present his art.
The denouement of the performance drove meaning even deeper. Audience members remained seated on four sides of the ring at the end of the dance. After a minute or two of rest, Pitts and Fredericks sat in front of the quarter to the west of us and spoke briefly and moved to our side as that section of spectators left. Pitts told a story of how, I think he was in his teens, he and his father fought each other and quickly regretted the violence. He said that his father, when they were reconciling soon after this, had reached over towards him. Pitts moved his own hand towards Fredericks’ face, hesitated and asked: “May I touch you?” Getting assent, his hand tugged at Fredericks’ chin, as Pitts’ dad had done in times of intimacy and love. The two dancers had just spent more than an hour of bodily intimacy such as Pitts and his father could never have experienced, but this request for permission carried on and deepened the serious beauty of their performance.
Thank you, Emily Maltz, for sponsoring this.
Ignorant of dance details, I was glad for the program’s reference to the Lindy Hop, the early 20th Century dance craze that depends on the strength and inspiration of two dancers. We could see, in this light, the history and continued beauty of American popular dance.
Pitts attributes this work to between tour visits to Brooklyn, his home, where it seemed that boxing was on TV everyday and where after being repulsed by the violence, he saw exhausted boxers collapsing in each other's arms and he then thought of male bodies, their vulnerability, and even their artistic presentation. He sought out the fights of Mohamed Ali, whose “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” he found to be a six step dance move. Late night and body-packed dance parties around the world also inspired Touch of Red. TRIBE consists of the dancers, scene designer, lighting designer and music coordinator. They performed another work at The Walker last year and will return next year for the final part of a three year collaboration of these artists and sponsors. See Pitts interviewed on The Northrup’s website.
The ten round bout never stopped as Pitts and Fredericks moved from combat to display to intimacy as abstracted house music played and blood red lighting kept eyes centered . Not ten seconds of relaxation or respite for dancers or audience.
I thought of Between the World and Me, the book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which he focuses his understanding of the story of his life on being a person with a black male body. I haven’t finished this powerful book but hope that by the end Coates will have celebrated the black male body with a portion of the joy that Pitts and Fredericks brought to the stage.
The work was exhausting, erotic, violent, entrancing, challenging, tender, beautiful.
As part of a mainly white audience, I considered how Coates might review the whole of the “exhibition” - just another version of black entertainments for white audiences? I hope not, I think Pitts dances on his own terms, gathers his own history and chooses how to present his art.
The denouement of the performance drove meaning even deeper. Audience members remained seated on four sides of the ring at the end of the dance. After a minute or two of rest, Pitts and Fredericks sat in front of the quarter to the west of us and spoke briefly and moved to our side as that section of spectators left. Pitts told a story of how, I think he was in his teens, he and his father fought each other and quickly regretted the violence. He said that his father, when they were reconciling soon after this, had reached over towards him. Pitts moved his own hand towards Fredericks’ face, hesitated and asked: “May I touch you?” Getting assent, his hand tugged at Fredericks’ chin, as Pitts’ dad had done in times of intimacy and love. The two dancers had just spent more than an hour of bodily intimacy such as Pitts and his father could never have experienced, but this request for permission carried on and deepened the serious beauty of their performance.
Thank you, Emily Maltz, for sponsoring this.
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Too nice not to include is Pitts' response to reading a version of this appreciation, via Philip Blither of Walker Art Ctr,
Reading the appreciation/kinda review brought many tears to my eyes, still rolling down my face as I write this. Please thank the new dance audience participant so much for seeing me, Tushrik & the multidisciplinary art work we create at TRIBE.
Funny enough, I have been re/reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me for many years, unfinished too! I think of Ta-Nehisi & this book often ... definitely while creating Touch of RED ... which is why, reading the kinda review,
I cry joyfully.
Ah ~ I am truly so grateful to you, Kristen, Walker & Northrop teams for your unparalleled partnership as well as Rus & TRIBE team's care, skills, & creativity
Together we go!
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