“it’s the end of the world; a year after Michael’s death, a harp falls from the sky.”  

 

fly baby fly is a dance by choreographer and visual artist Malcolm-X Betts, created with dancer Molly Lieber and sound designer GENG PTP. Its origins reside partly in Betts’s childhood loss of his cousin Michael to AIDS, though the work neither illustrates nor explains that history. Instead, memory enters the dance as atmosphere, weight, rhythm—a knowledge the body carries before language can name it. Across a landscape of sacred objects, vibrating sound, and charged physical encounter, two bodies test the gravitational pull of attachment. They brace, yield, collide, suspend; rage flashes into ecstasy, tenderness into fatigue, grief into propulsion. Movement becomes both psychic event and embodied repository, holding private loss alongside the larger discourse that haunts non-dancing genderqueer bodies.  Part ritual, part experiment, part physical prayer, fly baby fly inhabits that strange territory where mourning becomes desire and exhaustion produces another possibility for motion. The body is burden, witness, archive—and perhaps an instrument of transcendence. Under the immense gravity of what has been lost, two bodies rehearse the impossible: how to become light enough to transcend reality and ultimately fly. fly baby fly is produced and co-presented by Mabou Mines in association with Danspace Project.

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Malcolm-x Betts is a New York–based visual artist and dancer who believes art is a transformative vehicle that brings people and communities together. His work investigates embodiment, liberation, Black imagination, and engages with the challenges imposed on the body. He was the resident curator at Judson Memorial Church and the founder of the curatorial platform Black Aesthetics, which is dedicated to enabling artistic freedom and making art accessible to all. As a dancer, he has performed in works by Snoogybox (Andy Kobilka), Nile Harris, Moriah Evans, and Alex Romania. His choreographic work has been presented and supported by venues including New York Live Arts, Movement Research, La MaMa Umbria, Danspace Project, and Judson Common, amongst others.