Life, Death, Little Deaths, and a New Year Too

Dominica Greene makes snow angels in a small pool of light. As the audience chatter at Danspace Project quiets down, she revs to life. Rocking and talking about a rickety fan found in her grandparents’ house in Guyana, her shakes and shudders illustrate the pleasure her body derives from the appliance’s particular rhythm. “Me and you,” she continually directs, with perfect comedic timing, to the prosaic-looking fan onstage as she comes to a standing twerk. “I have to make you the star of my next piece.”

Performance

Dominica Greene's “endlessend” / Malcolm-x Betts in “fly baby fly”

Place

Danspace Project, New York, NY, December 12, 2026

Words

Candice Thompson

Dominica Greene and Garrett Allen in “endlessend.” Photograph by Rachel Keane

But this masturbation story is more than a humorous intro or conceptual conceit; it is the seed out of which “endlessend” explores desire, love, grief. And what at first seems like a silly solo dance reveals itself to be two deeply felt duets: one a love letter Greene delivers to the plastic object, and the other a shadow relationship, physicalized by Greene and creative collaborator Garrett Allen.

“endlessend” alternates between these two duets or “overlapping realms,” as Greene describes in a program note. A slow dance between Greene and Allen on the balcony, where she seems to bring them to life, is followed by a monologue about her plot to take the fan with her back to NYC. Her grandmother advises, “Take the fan and run!” when she faces an aunt’s resistance to her plan. Later, Greene and Allen dart across opposite sides of the balcony in a playful phrase, eyes locked on each other across the void. Soon after, she tells of breaking apart the fan and putting it into her suitcase. The piece builds to a climax, both literally and figuratively, as the pair of performers chase each other in the backlit lobby and spill back out onto the stage where bouncing become thrashing that revolves in a big pattern around the stage. Greene is left grinding on the fan’s column as Allen oscillates uncertainly on the perimeter.

In the aftermath of this frantic release, desperation slides in. The fan is now broken beyond repair—even the repairman she consults suggests, practically but callously, to simply buy a new one. But Greene resists the idea that all things must end.

She runs in a huge circle holding the fan out like a hockey stick. The power she generates turns the broken blades manually. It is funny and inventive, but in a heartbreaking kind of way. Allen thrashes the extra-long sleeves of their black shirt as Greene collapses on the ground, ear to her beloved object. Ending with a visual and aural metaphor, Greene pulls on their sleeves. The distance between their bodies grows as a series of rhymes—“suspend the ending” and “transcend the end”—form an incantation, leaving words in the wake of what was once a throbbing wind.

Dominica Greene and Garrett Allen in “endlessend.” Photograph by Rachel Keane

Likewise, Malcom-x Betts’ “fly baby fly,” which opened the shared evening with Greene this past December, is a shimmering, hammering, transcendent memorial to life, even as it manages to suspend its performers in the messy process of grief.

A program note states: “‘fly baby fly’” is for Betts’ older cousin Michael who died of AIDS. ‘It’s the end of the world; a year after Michael’s death a harp falls from the sky,’ Betts writes.”

And so Betts serenades us with a roughhewn harp, plugged into sound practitioner and DJ Geng PTP’s sound booth, as we find our seats. He paces and strums and plucks, making sounds that wander and warp, modulating in volume from gentle to ear piercing and back again. One of his paintings hangs in an upstage corner picturing two people under a giant sun, one with puffy could-like hands. This moody overture is interrupted by a welcome speech. When the piece begins again, the volume and feedback increase tenfold and after a blackout, Betts and Molly Lieber walk on in hooded sweatsuits.

They roll, pop, and dangle their limbs and heads off their spines to Geng PTP’s roaring sound design. Though their bodies cross, the two performers don’t yet acknowledge each other as they work through two individual scores. Lieber’s highly elastic frame bends and extends in all directions, searching backwards on all fours; Betts melts and scoots into ever more balletic shapes like arabesques and sous-sous. A casual head nod finds them in agreement, and they cross over to a pillar so that Lieber can climb up Betts’s back all the way to his shoulders.

She grabs a Guinness from this high perch and cracks it as Betts conducts the toast like he is leading an orchestra. The detail of prosaic beer brand is a touching tribute in its own way, a reminder of how the small preferences of our loved ones never leave us. While Lieber undresses on the balcony, Betts teeters on his various edges. It is a pleasure to watch him in his zone: moving from tiny shifts to reverse fan kicks, smooth motions into explosive jumps, and taking ever bigger risks as he flips from one off-kilter balance to another even more precarious stance dangerously near the audience.

Molly Lieber and Malcolm-x Betts in “fly baby fly.” Photograph by Rachel Keane

Similarly, Lieber causes one to hold their breath when she crawls up onto the platform behind the audience and wobbles like a possessed rag doll in shredded clothes. Meanwhile, Betts is at the mic, ticking through a mix of absurd public service announcements about safe sex like, “one kiss is all it takes,” and other colorful street slang admonitions such as, “if money right, keep that pussy tight.” The mixed messages and ecstasy pile up until Lieber finally screams. She rolls down the stairs to him and they riff on possibilities: what this may or may not be about, who will be the soft top tonight. They are proxies in a role-played romantic encounter that ends darkly. Betts proclaims: “It’s me that gets devoured.”

But what if our chewed-up bits could be regurgitated into something crystalline? And not just once, but summed up over and over?

After a reprise of their scores, this time with bigger moves and grander falls to the sound of a sermon, Lieber is left alone onstage. In a wide stance, torso bent parallel to the floor, she extends her arms at an extreme angle behind her. She meditates in the posture for what seems like a few elongated minutes, her arms slowly articulating like the wings of a massive bird. As her arms ripple in a square of light, a gospel song plays. The image, and the sacred feeling it conjures, coalesces, disperses, and reforms: sharp yet soft, soaring and full of poetic justice.

As we move into the new year, it seems like the biggest job we have is to maintain our humanity and individuality in the face of so many forces seeking to cheapen and homogenize our existence. At Danspace in December, those dark forces of tyranny, greed, and neglect that currently consume so much of our airspace, were noticeably absent in the presence of such artistry. Lieber’s profoundly moving sculpture has stayed with me, becoming an ephemeral monument in my mind. I am keeping it close in 2026, trading the conquering man-on-horse for this uncaged femme-albatross-spirit-of-stage.

Candice Thompson

Candice Thompson has been working in and around live art for over two decades. She was a dancer with Milwaukee Ballet before moving into costume design, movement education and direction, editing and arts writing. She attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduated from St. Mary’s College LEAP Program, and later received an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. From 2010-2021 she was editorial director of DIYdancer, a project-based media company she co-founded. Her writing on dance can be found in publications like Andscape, ALL ARTS, ArtsATL, The Brooklyn Rail, Dance Magazine, and the New York Times.

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