Jade Charon’s “Gold Pylon” and Malcolm-x Betts’s “Niggas at Sundown” offered radically different types of testimony. Charon is also a filmmaker and video art of her dancing in flames while on water set up a spiritual space for her conversion story. With the admonition “whether you believe it or not, you are a witness,” she links stories from different stages of her life where she experienced an ominous look from “Michael”—a white male version of a “Karen,” whose gaze is a precursor to violence—with bits of family history, including a recording of her grandmother’s testimony in church, and research from time spent in Egypt, where she learned more about the gold pylons framing temples. Acting as congregant, temple dancer, and healer, she seeks and finds both God and gold and in an experimental bit, offers her alms to a willing participant in the audience.

While Charon’s solo was inspired by the kind of testimony offered in church, Betts and his collaborators Nile Harris, Andy Kobilka, and Arien Wilkerson, blurred the lines between stand-up comedy and polemic. As irreverent and sacrilegious and blasphemous to the institutions of dance as it is possible to be, Betts and Wilkerson stumble and climb through the audience dressed in a wrestling singlet and underwear, introducing themselves by way of roasting the powers that be—including those who programmed them and were in the audience, like Live Arts’ own Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong, other presenters in attendance like Nicky Paraiso of LaMaMa Experimental Theater, and those who are all too often the programmed, naming names like Abraham and Faye Driscoll. Throughout, Betts mostly played the striving choreographer to Wilkerson’s artist-on-the-verge, repeating a whining desire to be taken seriously in-between Wilkerson’s red-hot rebukes of dance’s hierarchies and demands to be paid. In one hilarious bit, Betts acknowledges being upstaged by his collaborator but insists this must just mean he is a good choreographer. (And indeed, being brave enough to make room for the virtuosic Wilkerson to do their thing—in essence, torch the place—might qualify as a stroke of genius.)  

As they make it to the stage, the long list of traumas, professional slights, grants nearly received, taunts (“This is for you, Bill,” followed by a perfectly executed pirouette), and retorts (“Take me to Chick Fil-A, Bill” or the more concise “Suck my @#$!”) escalates. Catching each other’s bodies in partnering that devolves into various forms of grappling, interrupted with the occasional coupé jeté and pas de bouree, Betts offers weak apologies in a futile effort to counter Wilkerson’s unrelenting rant. An intermittent screeching from the colliding of microphones layers an uncomfortable and discordant note on top of Kobilka’s more ambient sound design. Harris was absent from the cast at the performance I saw; that the show didn’t seem to be missing an element was another testament to the chemistry between Betts and Wilkerson.

While critiquing the various -isms and abuses of power in the dance and larger arts industry has become more common, it is often done in safe spaces, outside of the larger institutions, among like-minded peers. But it takes courage to bring the takedown of an institution to its own audiences and directors and donors, and to continue to bring that outsider perspective, and a raucous one at that, even after you have been let in. Haven’t we all been taught not to bite that hand? It is exciting to think about where we can go from here, if we can begin to unlearn the sycophantic habits that abide the things we claim to want to change.