Brooklyn-based choreographer Shamel Pitts, founder of the multidisciplinary collective TRIBE, brings “Marks of RED” to Kaatsbaan Cultural Center tonight at 6 p.m., as part of its New Work Preview series, which invites artists in residence to share works in progress. Audiences are offered a look into the creative process.
A MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and Bessie Award winner, among many awards, Pitts continues his acclaimed RED Series with this new work. “Marks of RED” envisions the “womb space” as an Afrofuturist realm, meaning a way to imagine a future shaped by Black experience, where memory, sensation, and creativity meet. Six women dancers perform alongside Pitts’s longtime collaborators in design, projection, and sound.
The New York Times, writing of a previous installment in the series, praised Pitts’s “commanding theatrical imagination” and his ability to transform darkness into “a site of communion and rebirth.”
“Marks of RED” extends that vision, looking toward renewal and transformation through a distinctly feminine lens.
As in much of Pitts’s work, “Marks of RED” draws on club culture, reflecting the communal energy and expressive freedom found in LGBTQ+ nightlife.
A Brooklyn native and Juilliard graduate, Pitts danced with Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Hell’s Kitchen Dance before joining Batsheva Dance Company under Ohad Naharin for seven years. He was a Jacob’s Pillow artist in residence in 2020.
Catherine Tharin is a choreographer, writer, curator, and educator. Her writing on dance has appeared in The Dance Enthusiast, Interlocutor, Side of Culture, and the Boston Globe. Tharin currently curates The Dance Series at the Stissing Center in Pine Plains, NY, and dance film at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY. Throughout her career, she has championed both innovative and legacy choreography, supported the work of artists across the field, and brought critical attention to the art form. Her latest dance, In the Wake of Yes, was noted as "powerfully animated, positively fizzy, full of droll wit" (Fjord), “The piece blended dance, art, and language into a layered meditation on love and emotional vulnerability." (Eye on Dance).
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