Malik Nashad Sharpe premieres Hang Time at The Place

This October, choreographer Malik Nashad Sharpe AKA Marikiscrycrycry’s new work for eight performers, Hang Time, performs at The Place in London. Choreographing and performing in his most ambitious work to date, Hang Time is born out of the experiences and psychological horror of unexpected loss. Through the physical, emotional, gestural language of choreography, and a meditation on what is left behind, it retraces what happens to men in grief, how loss is processed, and how cultures of masculinity, violence and psychological play collide. Sharpe crafts a single suspended world with tenderness and joy in an unfolding spiritual soundscape punctuated with personal, memory-sparking pop tracks. Hang Time’s world premiere is in Germany, touring to Denmark, and its UK premiere is at The Place, London.

Building upon Malik Nashad Sharpe's decade-long practice and his shows ‘He’s Dead’ and solo performance horror ‘Goner’, Hang Time is a new choreographic work exploring cultures of masculinity among Caribbean men and how tragedy and challenging emotional experiences are dealt with. His work often creates circumstances where audiences are entertained and then compelled to think about what they have witnessed, with space to sit with their emotions.

Developed over two years, the piece has evolved into a group work that examines how a group of individuals responds to extraordinary grief and how they are deeply affected and irrevocably changed, recreated texturally through contemporary and Caribbean dance practices.

Malik Nashad Sharpe says: “I want audiences to fall in love with this group of people, and to become invested in them as they move through something together. There’s a real collectivity to the work, but also a sense that grief changes the relationships between them and changes what we see in each person. The movement is big, athletic, decorative and maximalist. There are jumps, balleticism, social dances, moments of heightened virtuosity, but also exhaustion, collapse and bodies having to support one another whilst negotiating challenging and complex movement language.”

The title Hang Time is an urban Black American colloquial term accumulating several associations for Sharpe, some are culturally specific: hanging out, hanging in the air/airtime, braids hanging from the nape, hanging on/hanging by a thread, and a darker association - hanging by a rope. The piece explores diaspora, how Caribbean identity fits in and contributes to a larger Black cultural heritage. Caribbean instruments appear, among them calypso, steel pans, and tabla drums.

The work is suspended between bouyon and soca, séance, ritual, social gathering, and catastrophe. Hanging is transformed into a social, historical, choreographic, and metaphysical condition through states of endurance, collapse, congregation, and reverberation. Staged, visually arresting images engage with the audience, creating a place to examine what it is to be a human being, playing with gravity and with suspended moments.

Malik Nashad Sharpe says: “There’s a lot of candy in Hang Time, a lot of sweets for people to enjoy. It’s beautiful, high-energy and virtuosic, and there’s real joy in it. But that pleasure exists right alongside the more emotional and psychological dimensions of grief. I’m interested in how dance can abstract those experiences without making them any less real: grief can become rhythm, exhaustion, virtuosity, decoration, repetition, a body falling, another body carrying it. For me, movement is probably the most apt form for synthesising the complexity of everything that Hang Time is dealing with.”

Set in a clean, urban landscape, the piece features stylised lighting designed by Barnaby Booth, using 1960s Japanese horror cinema as a reference point. Erik Annerborn’s bespoke costumes, crafted in his atelier in Sweden, bind the company through a shared colour palette and cut. Sharpe’s creative collaborators further include rehearsal direction by Blue Makwana and dramaturgy by Jay Miller.

Hang Time is co-commissioned by The Place (London), Dansehallerne (Copenhagen), Tanzhaus NRW (Düsseldorf), and MAYk (Bristol) and supported by Arts Council England, Yale University’s Remapping Dance Residency, and East London Dance.

Hang Time’s UK premiere is at The Place from 29 October to 31 October. The European tour includes Germany (15 and 16 October, Tanzhaus NRW) and Denmark (21 and 22 October, Dansehallerne).

For more information and to book tickets, visit: theplace.org.uk/events/autumn-winter-26-hang-time