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.