whale fall abyss
mayfield brooks
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.
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-3 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and is currently the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program. They love living by the sea.
whale fall abyss and whale fall reckoning are the culmination of mayfield brooks’s Whale Fall project, supported in past iterations by Abrons Arts Center, CPR – Center for Performance Research, Danspace Project, Performance Space New York, River to River Festival 2023, UNTITLED Art Fair, and Kathleen Hermesdorf FRESH Festival 2024.
mayfield brooks is presented as part of the 2024 River to River Festival, with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels. Profoundly attached to the world of dance since its origins, the High Jewelry Maison strengthens its commitment with Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels.
Guided by the values of creation, transmission and education, this initiative aims to support artists and institutions in presenting choreographic heritage, while also promoting new productions.
Since its launch in 2020, it has promoted numerous dance companies for their creations as well as the presentation of multiple performances around the world.
The program is complemented each year by major events, including the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival, whose first edition took place in London in March 2022.
This support further extends to awareness-raising actions focused on dance culture for the broadest possible audience, professionals and amateurs alike.