Accompanied by electronic cellist, Dorothy Carlos, and performer Camilo Restrepo

June 19-22, 7pm
Tall Ship Wavertree
at the South Street Seaport Museum
FREE (Reservation Requested)

Accessibility: Please note that visiting Wavertree includes climbing up a few stairs, walking up an angled gangway, and then down a few stairs onto the deck. Access to the lower decks is by stairs; access to the upper deck is by steep ladder-like stairs. This site is not wheelchair accessible.

Choreographer mayfield brooks presents two works–whale fall abyss in the cargo hold of the Tall Ship Wavertree, calling up ghosts and ancestors from the intersecting histories of whalers and slave ships and whale fall reckoning in the Upper Gallery of The Arts Center at Governors Island. Using found objects, sound, light, movement and projection, brooks conjures an abyssal underwater world that transforms the formerly munitions storage warehouse into an imagined site of the decomposed whale.

Both presentations are a culmination of brooks’ project Whale Fall, originally commissioned by Abrons Arts Center and virtually premiered as an experimental dance film in 2021 during the height of the Covid-19 epidemic. When Whale Fall (the film) premiered brooks wrote, “This project was born out of a desire to sit with grief and rage in a world that discards too much and consumes too much. As a result, the bodies of whales and the bodies of Black folk seem to have a kinship in how they have been both targeted, hunted and consumed since the transatlantic slave trade. I have also come to know that some slave ships were used as whaling vessels.” In this present moment of continued environmental destruction caused by war and accelerated global warming, brooks is asking, “What light reaches us? What darkness welcomes the reckoning?”

After four years of rigorous research and numerous iterations, brooks’s ever evolving project Whale Fall continues to decompose itself. This iteration lives as a call to the wild parts of ourselves, a denouement to complacent attitudes towards death and decay. How are we entangled in the ruse of romance with our compulsion to consume and our dependence on war machines? Why do we continue to kill? How can the whale fall reorient us to face our own mortality with more compassion? brooks considers the whale fall as a reckoning. They imagine their ancestor’s bones mingling with whale bones beckoning us to embrace interspecies care and relation beyond the human. Perhaps we can save the whales, ourselves, and the planet if we simply decompose.

Performers: mayfield brooks, performer; Dorothy Carlos, electric cellist; Camilo Restrepo, performer

mayfield brooks is part of LMCC’s Extended Life Dance Development Program supported, in part, by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Presented in partnership with the South Street Seaport Museum.

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