Malik Nashad Sharpe (alias Marikiscrycrycry) is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed choreographer whose works are always marked by an uncompromising approach that both challenges and moves audiences. Their art is intense, raw, and deeply human – pulling us into the abyss only to reveal the light.
Dansehallerne has had the pleasure of presenting several of Sharpe’s works – including the explosive Dark, Happy, to the Core in collaboration with Roskilde Festival, the solo piece GONER at Betty Nansen Teatret, and in October 2025 the performance AIR BODY SAD, created with the influential Swedish company Norrdans.
When Malik Nashad Sharpe takes hold of the stage as Marikiscrycrycry, it’s as if hopelessness is beckoning him toward the abyss, and we, the audience, are being sucked in alongside him.
Sharpe’s creations are a thing of violence and brutality, but in that, we find catharsis – the darkness we experience is not senseless, but rather a necessary gateway towards hope.
For Sharpe, his works are not simply artistic expressions; they are necessities. He seeks to reassure us and point to our ability to transform our suffering. In his words, “The darkness of our life is okay, you are not alone in that. It’s temporary, you have the power to make it something else.”
In the summer of 2023, Danish audiences experienced this up close: Dark, Happy, to the Core, in collaboration between Dansehallerne and Roskilde Festival, exploded on stage with an energy that left both critics and audiences breathless. Weeks later came the solo work GONER at Betty Nansen Teatret – a piece so raw and affecting it felt like watching a soul being turned inside out.
From Darkness to Movement
Sharpe grew up in New York in a Caribbean migrant family, his childhood marked by instability, limited resources, and a pervasive sense of rootlessness.
Dance entered his life as an escapist survival strategy. At 13, he joined his high school’s show choir. There, in borrowed dance studios, he found not just movement, but a glimpse of a possible future. The teachers around him understood that here was a boy who needed a refuge, and they lifted him up: “I think, behind closed doors, these teachers saw I needed help. So they gave me a space to exist and believed in me – I really needed that.”
That faith in dance carried him forward. First to Williams College, where he earned a BA in Experimental Dance with highest honors, then to London and Trinity Laban, where he received the Simone Michele Prize for Choreography. What began as an escape became a calling.
A Fluid Being
Today, Sharpe lives in London, though he is rarely at home. Tours, guest performances, residencies, and teaching take him around the world: “I see it as a legacy I was handed,” he explains, “I grew up in New York, but my family is not from there, they grew up somewhere else, and so it goes back, I don’t have a sense of home that most people have.”
Yet this rootlessness has also made him a being in constant transformation – fluid, agile, able to absorb and adapt to new environments. It is an experience that runs through his artistic practice: “It’s a privilege, sometimes a necessity. It’s complex, it’s a curse.”
Choreography as Thought
Sharpe describes choreography as a place for thinking. His works are filled with reflection and, at the same time, uncompromisingly physical: “The only way for me to feel okay in the world was to be doing something physical.”
In his choreography, horror is used as an aesthetic device, but never for effect alone. For him, it is about “Having the social responsibility to see and say. What my work says about me is that I’m seeing, I’m paying attention.” The result is performances that do not merely entertain, but insist on creating space for contemplation, “The body is a brain,” as he puts it.
A Particular Presence
To meet Malik Nashad Sharpe is to encounter an artist who is both considered and immediate, both deeply protective of himself and entirely open. He can come across as someone who carries darkness close, yet he insists on light, on the joy of having created a life in which he can exist and be an inspiration to others: “I created this life for myself, that’s a light in my life for sure. It starts to make sense why you work so hard, it’s not only for you.”
That conviction runs through every Marikiscrycrycry performance. They are never solely about Sharpe himself; they are mirrors in which audiences glimpse their own fractures, their own resilience. The works remind us that hopelessness, though recurring, is never absolute, that transformation, however fragile, is always possible.
Astral projection – the ability to fully transcend one’s physical body and observe oneself from the outside – is the superpower Sharpe would wish for if he encountered the genie in the bottle. It is also one of the reasons he loves creating dances in which he does not perform: in those works, he moves beyond himself, witnessing and beholding something that still belongs to him, and of which he remains a part.
As one of the most distinctive choreographic voices of our time, Sharpe’s art asks us to dwell in discomfort, to confront the shadows that shape us, and to discover within them a stubborn, luminous hope.
“It’s about transformation; the reward is being able to transform our darkest moments into something.”
ABOUT
Malik Nashad Sharpe is an Associate Artist at The Place in London and a resident at Somerset House Studios, with previous residencies at Sadler’s Wells, Barbican, and Tate Modern. He holds a BA in Experimental Dance from Williams College and a certificate in Contemporary Dance from Trinity Laban, where he received the Simone Michele Prize for Outstanding Choreography.
Sharpe was named Rising Star in Dance by Attitude Magazine (2019) and featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list (2022). He is based in London and teaches dance and performance at the Stockholm University of Arts.
