Every 2024 Time Based Art Festival preview—including ours—gravitated towards the image of choreographer Malik Nashad Sharpe (AKA Marikiscrycrycry) shirtless, sweating, and dripping blood from his mouth, mid-laugh.
To say Sharpe stood out is something of an understatement, especially since it’s a long-practiced tradition for contemporary performance and concept artists to make their work look as uninteresting as possible. In this year's festival brochure alone, more than one used an image of a rock.
As it turns out, Sharpe's bloody portrait is a perfect indication of what to expect from his 55-minute solo show Goner, down to the semi-sheer short shorts and pink velour chaps.
A note to the audience: If you don't want fake blood splattered on your fit, avoid the front row. We were advised of this at the box office and pleased that at least seven people took the blood splatter challenge. The other warning is about Goner's music: frenetic Caribbean- and soca-inspired dancehall played at a volume that vibrated the raised seating in Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA)'s Annex.
At least 70 percent of Goner is Sharpe performing next-level booty-dancing. It's dazzling. Like many dancers, his muscles are pronounced, flexing in different areas with control. Sharpe's glutes move like keys on a player piano, even as the overall choreography toys with the viewer, fluctuating between eroticism and anxiety.
Initially wearing just shorts, trainers, and a thick pink cord, secured around his neck and dangling down his back, Sharpe later emerges from a bloody scene in the aforementioned pink velour chaps. But the horror of Goner isn't found in gore; it's in the jump scares (give up now, you will not anticipate them) and the story's mysterious, brooding charm.
Sharpe performs most of Goner faced away from the audience, working through long, choreographed sequences—with elements of twerk and athletic ballet-like full-body leaps—that could be mistaken for improvisation, if not for a few specific motions that signal the end or beginning of a cycle. Scenes transition in reaction to a disembodied voice bellowing over the music, addressing Sharpe as "number 222," and repeatedly warning: "You may be punished."
If the character is imprisoned, is the dancing a means of torture, escape, or memory?
On a circular rug, the kind you buy in college for comfort that ends up just being somewhere that garbage collects, Sharpe weaves together a monologue of friendship, desire, murder, and dinner—in that order. In the story, he places a pork belly rice bowl by his lover and prone victim, remembering "it was like the day we first met... wasted and hungry."
While this story describes a crime, it's not explicit that this is why the dancer onstage appears to be imprisoned. The show's program notes explain a goner as "someone who is doomed with no chance of survival—bound to death, a lost and hopeless case." Also in those notes, Sharpe describes the work as "lightly touching on topics of abuse, Caribbean migration, alienation, belonging, addiction, and violence."
But there's ultimately plenty of room to imagine your own circumstances, while respecting those: I initially misheard a bellowing order and thought he was in outer space.
In a 2023 interview discussing Goner, Sharpe mentioned two anime horror series: Junji Ito Maniac: Tales of Japanese Macabre and Akame ga Kill! It's fair to say he's probably also familiar with the most popular anime in the world right now Jujutsu Kaisen, which proposes as a plot point that love is the greatest curse one can lay.
Our other 2024 TBA Reviews:
Te Moana Meridian Proposes Moving the Prime Meridian
If You Want Solitude, Stay Far Away From Club Alive
PICA Annex, 15 NE Hancock, Thurs Sept 12 & Fri Sept 13, 7 pm, SOLD OUT
