Cherish Menzo DARKMATTER

[Dance]

DARKMATTER is an exploration into the materialities and possibilities of being in Blackness carried by choreographer Cherish Menzo together with Camilo Mejía Cortés. Playing with the textures of sound, liquid, and light, the performers pry open the making of dance and question its staged configurations.

The scene is set for two dancers clad in mirror-reflecting masks. With ceremonial care, one covers the other’s torso with a dark liquid. An extended blackout marks the scene shift, interrupted by a glitchy break: a performer’s face is revealed, and is promptly strobed out. This stop-and-start rhythm, pressing against linear time and blurring identification, stems from choreographer Cherish Menzo’s deep dive into the archival sounds of hip hop’s “Chopped and Screwed” genre, born in the 1990s from DJ Screw’s Houston-based studio. As such, DARKMATTER experiments with the embodiment of these slowed-down tempos. Distortion becomes a significant choreographic tool for Menzo to remix representations and warp them, upside-down. Indeed, working with the materialities of bodies invites cosmic questioning, channeled through afrofuturist and posthumanist speculations. Dark holes above become portals into seas below. DARKMATTER concocts this threshold where gestures, like perceptions, melt and move, “boneless / formless”.