Malcolm-x Betts and Nile Harris Come to The Chocolate Factory Theater

The Chocolate Factory Theater will launch its Spring 2025 season with the premiere of Temporary Boyfriend, a new dance performance by Malcolm-x Betts and Nile Harris.

In Temporary Boyfriend, Malcolm-x Betts and Nile Harris stage the nuanced poetics of their long-term collaboration. Longtime performers in one another’s work -  including Niggas at Sundown (New York Live Arts) and this house is not a home (Abrons Arts Center), Betts and Harris render the friction and intrigue at the pith of their connection in this improvisatory duet. 

Traversing every corner of The Chocolate Factory’s barren architecture, the pair address various touch points of relationality between Black gay men. From the kinship of ancestors lost to the AIDS epidemic, to contemporary manifestations of ephemeral gay brotherhood, Temporary Boyfriend is an intimate portrait of the aesthetics of proximity and estrangement; paying homage to an era of a New York dance and performance scene gone by, along with a generation of Gay men, artists, and mentors lost to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. 

Within a dissonant environment of baby oil bottles, roving lights, rumbling synths, and chopped and screwed 90s R&B tunes, the duo moves from jerky isolations to virtuosic swings and releases, fleetingly citing popular Black social dances and aesthetics. Throughout, as Betts and Harris inhabit their familiar and intimate rapport, the work asks: Is this love for real or is it just a well constructed act? And if this is truth, why do we keep hurting each other? 

Created and performed by Malcolm-x Betts and Nile Harris. Sound Design: GENG PTP. Scenic & Technical Direction: Dyer Rhoads.