Performance Space New York Hosts mayfield brooks' WAIL-FALL-WHALE-FALL

Performance Space New York (150 1st Avenue, 4th Floor) presents mayfield brooks’s Wail•Fall•Whale•Fall (October 26–28), a new work continuing their “rich and poetic exploration of grief” (The New York Times) through the phenomenon of whale fall—the giant mammal’s decomposition after it dies, sinks to the ocean floor, and feeds thousands of sea creatures in its wake. Wail•Fall•Whale•Fall invites the public to wail, release, and find relief in a world where grieving is often shunned.

From 4-6pm the public is welcomed into a Wail Room—a space for the voice and body to grieve and decompose like organic matter in a whale fall. Starting at 7pm, brooks activates the Wail Room in acknowledgment of the labor of grief, coalescing human and nonhuman visions of loss and regeneration.

Accompanied by electronic cellist Dorothy Carlos and performer Camilo Restrepo, brooks creates an embodied sonic world that invites a prolonged deterioration of colonized spatial and temporal logic, and resists the performativity and spectacle of composition—and the ways we’re expected to grieve.

The artist attributes their interest in “decomposing dance” to their background in urban farming and firsthand experience with compost’s generative properties. This interest merged, for brooks, with the idea of whale fall in 2020, as illness and Black death collected into an ocean of grief and isolation.

Sharing the first work in the series, the 2021 film Whale Fall, they told The New York Times, “I want to find ways to be in an awareness of how Black death is a quotidian thing. It’s happening all the time, but, also, what does it mean when the bodies pile up? Do we get to decompose this trauma? Do we get to grieve it without it being a spectacle?...Maybe the whales are teaching us something about holding the toxicity and the pollution of the human problem of waste and climate change. When something is rotten to the core, how do we get inside of it and then try and work toward a whale fall?”

Like all of brooks’ work, this stems from their interdisciplinary dance methodology Improvising While Black (IWB), which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. For Wail•Fall•Whale•Fall, brooks studied whales off the Pacific coast of Colombia, bringing questions—of how to dive into air, how to move like water, how to move with a spine that keeps you horizontal—into the human form, considering these ideas alongside the ocean’s physical imprint within Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Haitian dance.

As Wail•Fall•Whale•Fall honors Black and queer siblings and ancestors who’ve died throughout vast and continuous histories of oppressive violence, alongside whale kin poisoned, injured, and killed by human and capitalist destruction, it asks: can a new interconnected and symbiotic cellular ecology emerge through the act of grieving? Can we echolocate our way back to each other at the bottom of the ocean?