Marikiscrycrycry is the alias of Malik Nashad Sharpe (he/they), an artist project that interrogates the downtrodden and dehumanising realities of Blackness. ‘What makes a monster?’ is the question begged by Marikiscrycrycry’s first solo in 7 years, Goner. Featured on the 2020 Forbes ‘30 under 30’ list for their pervasive choreographic achievements, Sharpe has presented work across the UK, Europe and Canada, engaging audiences with a persistent, provocative approach towards themes of violence and alienation. I spoke to Sharpe shortly after the piece premiered at NOW, a yearly festival at east London’s Yard Theatre, known for championing the alternative. The answer? Watching Goner is to be positioned defencelessly as the perpetrator of a crime; nobody walks away innocent.
review, article
Is Marikiscrycrycry… a goner?
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6 min
Goner occupies the hostile, concrete amphitheatre, bare except for the shower with semi-opaque plastic walls (later, it becomes a torture chamber, smeared with blood). Sharpe enters with a bounce, summoned by looping dancehall beats. Bare back turned defiantly, we’re forced to focus on the relentless sway, pulse and twerk of his hips, and a tail-like braid that lethally swings. Now and then, he slides inch by inch into side splits, sheen developing on his shoulders. Erotic as it can be in the absence of passion. After 15 minutes, just when observation becomes endurance, Sharpe – insert jump-scare – swivels round in sudden spotlight and silence, blood dripping from his mouth.
Horror, Sharpe tells me, has been their primary creative outlet for dealing with their own experiences for some time, despite only acknowledging this recently. Can horror be done live? Goner frequently plays into reflexes to utilise shock factor, for example when a repeated choreographic sequence builds tension towards a sudden violent image: neck-breaking twitches under flashing lights, followed by a gunshot. Such tropes trigger similar reactions onstage as they do on screen, over as quickly as they started, leaving little more than the jitters. Regardless, these simplistic devices deserve their place amongst dense themes. ‘I don’t want to bewilder audiences,’ Sharpe explains. ‘sometimes, it is purely about accessibility.
We are all a part of a society that creates monsters
But there is a deeper, lasting horror behind Sharpe’s choices. Goner mournfully and violently confronts the sinister themes within marginalisation. At one point, Sharpe confronts the audience, speaking directly to them from ‘in here’ – a reference to the cage-like structure, but to emotional imprisonment too. Goner positions the audience as the perpetrator, and the genre of horror, with its associated violence, only enhances this disparity of power. The theatre becomes a toxic magnification of the perpetual ‘us/them’ mindset – another deliberate artistic choice: ‘We are in a moment of historical amnesia around racism. People think that because we are in 2023 and we’ve moved on from certain things and I can have a show that people come and watch, that all of the violence in society, that I face, is not in the room when we gather.’ Goner locks the audience into active rather than passive engagement, to sit with the sour taste of what is implicated: we are all a part of a society that creates monsters.
In Goner, audience and performer are both shackled, the former prevented from pleading innocent, the latter at the mercy of a faceless voiceover. Sharpe’s centre-stage prison shower enhances the trauma of entrapment, aiming to ‘enclose space within space’. By casting light on its translucent walls, Sharpe’s form becomes uncertain, their lethargic movements blurred. The voiceover then instructs Sharpe to hurl their body over and over, bloody and exhausted, clawing the plastic into shreds until they fall through; finally released from the chamber – but only by following the voice’s commands.
Watching violent dance is like swallowing a hard truth. When Sharpe beats what appears to be a radio encased in bars with a club, it is uncomfortable, but such fury hasn’t cropped up from thin air. Sharpe believes that dance has an inherent positivity to it that goes unquestioned, a ‘need to be beautiful’, undoubtedly stemming from its pleasant traditions. Today, a contemporary performance is rarely just pleasant, but the term ‘beautiful’ has morphed from aesthetic to more subjective notions of impact and provocation that a piece leaves you with. Horror is a genre far removed from average perceptions of beautiful dance, but Sharpe explains that ‘Marikiscrcrycry’s entire practice has sought to understand if dance can take forms not usually seen.’
It becomes clear that Sharpe uses horror to their advantage, mutating, embodying and destroying forms that deviate from the norm, implying how an identity ruptures beneath the load of racism. ‘Horror relies on seeing someone in an impossibly vicious situation, one they cannot even see themselves,’ Sharpe explains. In a similar way, horror is woven into the fabric of daily life for the marginalised, who encounter covert situations as pernicious reminders of discrimination. ‘Even when things seem equal, they simply aren’t.’
What of the aftermath of a piece like Goner? ‘Only after performing the piece do I realise what needs to be processed,’ says Sharpe, but he is clear about his ongoing intention to ‘rewire the social condition of Blackness for something other than tragedy’. On a practical level, he explains, rewiring means expanding possibilities for Black artists, to eat away at the sinister limitations on what they are allowed to talk about and pursue. More imaginatively, it is – as in much dark fantasy – about defying tragic realities with superhuman alternatives. After being shot down midpiece in Goner, Sharpe rises again.
Is Goner a piece of protest? Sharpe is unsure – but is certain that nobody is a neutral actor in a nameless system. When the system we inhabit is society, the art we generate is inherently political. We speak of Jordan Peele, a filmmaker who has cracked open the genre of horror to centre certain Black experiences on the big screen, exposing the lurking, unaddressed politics with cinematic tools that in themselves evoke fear.
Goner possesses defiance and grief in equal parts. Blunt scares and nuanced dread, twerking and hiding in shadows, sentimental props and spaces within spaces are patchworked to illustrate a life on the edges. However, the work is strung together by the choice to turn attention towards us. Sharpe has not only performed horror live, but exposed the horror that was already present before they even entered. Here, whether you were haunted by it or not, is the acute fear and persistent frustration that Sharpe lives with – a stage for their monsters, a space to contest injustice that is deeply ingrained, not easily resolved and frightening to its very core. ●
02.06.23: Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, North Macedonia
01–02.09.23: Dansehallerne, Copenhagen, Denmark
For more info and other works, visit maliknashadsharpe.com
UPDATE. Full international tour for 2024–2025 announced:
29 Feb 2024 – Square Chapel Arts Centre, 10 Square Rd, Halifax, UK
2–3 Mar 2024 – Theatre in the Mill, Off Shearbridge Road, Bradford, UK
15–16 Mar 2024 – MDT Stockholm, Sweden
3–4 Apr 2024 – ICA, St James, London, UK
16 Apr 2024 – Cambridge Junction, Clifton Way, Cambridge Cambridge, UK
19 Apr 2024 – Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK
27 Apr 2024 – Live Collisions / Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Ireland
23–24 May 2024 – Mayfest, Bristol, UK
30 May 2024 – Gender House Queer Arts Festival, Aarhus, Denmark
7–8 June 2024 – Audra Festival, Kaunas, Lithuania
13–14 Sep 2024 Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, USA
19–22 Sep 2024 – Abrons Arts Centre, New York City, USA
28 Sep 2024 – The Place, London, UK
18 Oct 2024 – Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, UK
March 2025 – Undisciplined Festival, Brighton, UK
May 2025 – 9 Performance run Venue TBC, London, UK
