Creative Potential of Collaboration: Shamel Pitts on the Start of their Multi-year residency

In advance of embarking on a multi-year residency with the Walker Art Center and Northrop, movement artist Shamel Pitts considers the creative potential of this unique collaboration.

I am incredibly touched and propelled forward by Philip Bither (the Walker) and Kristen Brogdon’s (Northrop) three-year commitment to bringing my works, with my arts collective TRIBE, to communities in Minneapolis. I have never received a commitment like this before. (Nor have I ever been to Minneapolis!)

This marks the beginning of a fruitful and intentional partnership for many reasons. The invitation to visit Minneapolis for three consecutive years provides a rich opportunity to share with Twin Cities artists/communities. Over that time, we have planned public and intimate conversations with local artists and patrons, as well as community outreach events, movement workshops, and post-performance talks. We will also bring different multidisciplinary performance works to the Twin Cities each year. Thinking ahead to this multi-year collaboration, what strikes me most is not only how we began this three-year commitment with sharing our works as much as we continue but how we end.

Year one, TRIBE will bring three performances of our award-winning multidisciplinary trio BLACK HOLE to the Walker. This work is the third installment in the BLACK series triptych. According to NASA, “a black hole is so dense that gravity just beneath its surface, the event horizon, is strong enough that nothing—not even light—can escape.” Rather than explain the physics of a black hole, this piece invokes the potency of black holes to explore what the unknown contains: a portal of transformation and collective empowerment through the power of three.

In 2018, BLACK HOLE won the Cross Award in Verbania, Italy, and was a New York Times “Critics Pick.” The triptych series began with BLACK BOX: Little Black Book of Red and featured a ruminative solo.

Year two will bring the first live work in the RED series, titled Touch of RED. Touch of RED is a multidisciplinary performance duet inspired by the rapid-fire footwork of boxing, the African American jazz dance style Lindy Hop, Gaga movement language, and nightlife culture. Set in a stylized ring, designed by the MacArthur Fellow Mimi Lien, this dance duet examines the way Black men are perceived and perceive themselves in contemporary society, and how masculinity and vulnerability can be reconsidered and reconciled in a noncombative, compassionate, and healing way. Bold. Boiled. Blood.

For the final year, TRIBE will present its newest work in development, which currently has the working title Marks of RED. This work will examine the nuanced multiplicity within the interior and exterior chasms of shared human experiences, especially when narrated by and featuring the viewpoints of predominantly femme-presenting/identifying people of color.

The work will explore concepts such as the “womb space,” viewed metaphorically as a home, playground, bathtub, disco ball, threshold, nightclub, and a space of enfolding and regeneration that ruptures and overflows. It will explore the effect that memory has on our experiences, senses, bodies, reality, and imaginative possibilities. In the “womb space,” anything can happen.

Our futures are not predetermined by the past—be it history or even memory.

Each of these works is set inside of an Afrofuturistic landscape in which TRIBE artists of color create new stories that shine more luminous than our past. This is the ethos of our TRIBE.

Often, when I think about the word patronage, I envision a partnership mutually invested in the success of a product, but also one that reflects a genuine belief in an artistic voice that culminates into a nurturing relationship between artists and patrons.

I envision both artists and patrons walking with one another over time and, together, growing an artistic bond that benefits both sides, as well as the communities in which they present. Yet, within the current economic structure, I know that this is a rare risk to take.

I extend my immense gratitude to the Walker and Northrop for taking such a cultured risk, for allowing me the opportunity to develop as an artist, and for cultivating space for us to grow together.▪︎

Experience the first work in this residency Shamel Pitts | TRIBE: BLACK HOLE – Trilogy And Triathlon March 21-23, 2024 at the Walker. Learn more and get tickets here.