Choreographer Malik Nashad Sharpe, also known as Marikiscrycrycry, creates visceral works that merge dance, music, and performance to explore identity, community, and belonging. With Hang Time: The Niggaz’ I-Ching, Sharpe presents a new work about grief, masculinity, and the communities that emerge when life begins to fracture.
Hang Time: The Niggaz’ I-Ching is a choreographic meditation on hanging out and hanging on. To life, to each other, and by a thread. The title plays on the multiple meanings of “hang time.” In Black urban culture, it refers to the length of braided hair falling freely from cornrows, where braids become symbols of identity, protection, connection, and memory. At the same time, it evokes a state of suspension, where time seems to stand still and loss lingers in the air.
Created for five dancers, the performance follows a group of young men navigating the aftermath of sudden loss. Inspired by Sharpe’s own experience of grief, the performers carry one another, lose one another, and endure. Moving between soca and bouyon, séance, ritual, and gathering, the work conjures a state of congregation, suspension, and haunting.
Bringing the notion of “hang time” into dialogue with the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of changes and divination, the performance reflects on Black diasporic and Caribbean experiences of masculinity, vulnerability, and collective care. It asks what holds a community together when vulnerability has no place, and what remains suspended in the air after someone disappears.
BIO:
Malik Nashad Sharpe is a British-American choreographer and performance artist whose work exists at the intersection of dance, music, fashion, and performance. Through an experimental and physically charged practice, Sharpe challenges conventional ideas of choreography and expands the possibilities of movement as an artistic language.
Drawing on Black and diasporic experiences, Sharpe explores themes of identity, belonging, masculinity, power, and vulnerability. Through visceral and uncompromising works, Sharpe creates space for both critical reflection and embodied experience, where personal narratives intersect with broader social and cultural structures.
