Whales, Black our bodies, the ocean, local weather change, protest actions — over the previous few years, they’ve all made their manner into work by Mayfield Brooks, a choreographer, dancer and vocalist.
The newest setting for Brooks’s ever-evolving dance mission is an imposing one: the Tall Ship Wavertree, the final iron-hulled, three-masted cargo ship on the earth. Inbuilt 1885 and docked at Pier 16, the Wavertree extends in regards to the size of a soccer discipline.
This week, as a part of the River to River Competition, Brooks (who makes use of they/them pronouns) finishes their whale journey with two works: “Whale Fall Abyss,” a dance efficiency on the ship, which is a part of the South Road Seaport Museum; and “Whale Fall Reckoning,” a companion set up at a gallery — a former munitions room cupboard space — on Governors Island.
In “Abyss,” Brooks, sporting white, performs a compass dance — named for its round choreography — on one finish of the ship whereas Camilo Restrepo, in a protracted, swirling mint skirt that trails to the deck, is poised on a excessive platform, his torso undulating in what Brooks calls a backbone dance. Underneath an American flag rippling within the breeze, Restrepo appears somewhat just like the Statue of Liberty. Ultimately Brooks, now in the identical skirt, makes their strategy to him and so they conjoin for an prolonged backbone duet. Slowly they mesh into one another, one cradling the opposite in grief. It’s like their our bodies are melting.
This comes again to Brooks’s authentic level of departure: the act of decomposing, or a whale fall. After a whale dies, it sinks to the ocean ground the place its carcass provides vitamins to deepwater creatures. It turns into the ocean’s meals.
In “Abyss,” Brooks — who started the mission in the course of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests — appears at how demise and decay transcend the physique. “How do I give up to this ongoing decomposition course of, this ongoing regeneration by means of the whale fall, this ongoing area of decay?” they mentioned. “That to me is perhaps the inspiration of the work.”
For this iteration, Brooks has made a zine, through which they write, “I grieve and I decompose this grief each day.”
We’re all creatures on earth; all of us decompose. And right here, on the Wavertree, so does Brooks’s whale fall mission, which start as an experimental dance movie in 2021. That sense of disintegration occurs within the work’s conclusion, within the ship’s cargo maintain, the place Brooks is joined by Dorothy Carlos on the electrical cello. On this remaining part, a haunting mixture of music and dance, Brooks calls up ghosts and ancestors from whalers and slave ships. Prolonged sounds emanate from their physique that really feel as deep because the ocean ground.
Brooks’s presence — otherworldly and uncooked — takes on a penetrating, guttural unhappiness within the huge cargo maintain the place they’re seen, at first, from a distance. In a manner, Brooks’s concept of a decomposing dance occurs earlier than your eyes as Brooks and Carlos progressively decrease the amount till their sounds and notes really feel like whispers.
The efficiency is “virtually changing into the whale fall,” Brooks mentioned. “It’s like this decomposed dance and vocal efficiency. There are not any phrases. The motion is confined to smaller areas or our our bodies truly change into the whale in a way. And the sound rating is increasingly more ephemeral and fewer legible.”
Over the previous few years, Brooks has famous some analogies between the our bodies of whales and the our bodies of Black individuals. “I used to be wanting on the slave ship and I used to be wanting on the whaling ship, and what I observed was that after all with the slave ship, the cargo is the African our bodies,” Brooks mentioned. “However within the whaling ship, that’s the place they retailer the blubber.”
This, Brooks mentioned, “is the entanglement. That is how slavery and using Black our bodies as property intersected with the whaling trade.”
They see the ocean as “the womb of the earth” and one thing that wants safety, concepts that can form their subsequent mission. Nowadays, Brooks mentioned, ship strikes are one of many greatest causes of whale deaths. And there’s additionally the heaviness of the current second. The way it resonates in Brooks’s physique comes right down to the backbone.
“I see connections with the best way the whale dances and the best way the physique can transfer by means of water with the backbone,” Brooks mentioned. “What’s there to reclaim inside this heaviness? And with the dancing and with the sounds, for me, it’s about this sort of resonance with water. It’s reminiscence. It’s the best way that the backbone can transfer and may maintain dance or a motion or swimming, which to me is, you realize, dance.”
