There’s a strange and sometimes sublime contradiction at the heart of Black Hole by American dance artist Shamel Pitts, the closing event of Leicester’s Let’s Dance International Frontiers festival. On the one hand, its means are very spare: three performers, one plastic sheet, light, sound, and sparse dancing that often feels closer to animated imagery than choreographed action. On the other hand, it taps a world that is dense with hope and history – the stylish, speculative and symbol-saturated world of Afrofuturism: think graphic-novel figures, cosmic consciousness, ancestral mysticism and astral quests; think gods, machines, icons and aliens. The result is both fascinating and fragile, sometimes magnificent and sometimes meagre, where a special effect can suddenly feel like psychic lightning – and then revert.
In the first section, subtitled Trilogy, the dancers (Pitts, Marcella Lewis and Tushrik Fredericks) are birthed from beneath a glistening black sheet, bodies painted as if made of molten gold. At first floorbound and in close contact, then slowly rising and separating to sculptural crouched, standing and running poses (shades of Grace Jones’s iconic Island Life album cover), they seem less like humans than a single triploid entity, heliotropically drawn to a distant light that glows upon their blank, wide-eyed faces. A stirring beat activates them – fists pump upwards – before they mysteriously retreat back under that black birthing blanket.
In Triathlon, the second section, they emerge metamorphosed, now a kind of three-headed god-king, the plastic sheet forming a billowing gown as they process around the stage. They separate again, Lewis retaining the regal train as Pitts and Fredericks engage in an almost ritualistic mirror-dance, coiling and colliding in slow, exact symmetries. A mystic crown is projected proud on the backcloth, magnetically attracting beams of light towards it like – well, like cameras to a coronation (sometimes current events burst unbidden into the audience imagination). Lewis whips up a wind with her sheeting, and kaleidoscopic white lights spiral towards centre stage even as a pool of blackness – or is that Blackness? – slowly expands to engulf them, the performers, the stage and finally the auditorium, and us all.
