Meanwhile, Sarai and Pittman contributed solo works to the week, yet neither were free of ghosts. 

In “I want it to rain inside,” presented as part of Live Artery ’25, Sarai extends the self with a roving “I” character. She mixes an extraordinary range of vocals as the audience settles, repeating phrases that are by turns parental “mind your mama for me” and “stay away from boys” and searching, “I gotta go where I don’t know,” and “I have to start all the way over.” We are told “you can’t come,” but we go with her as she sets three metronomes to an overlapping time. She moves with a range and virtuosity that leaves no corners untouched in the room. It is by turns balletic and combative, legs flying at all angles. In one impossible feat—there are many, remember, she can lasso!—she lets her body fall backwards without any perceivable bend to soften the blow. Rolling up to stand again, she defies gravity two more times. As she tosses folding chairs, drapes her body on them, even yokes herself to them like a workhorse, the high velocity act gets more claustrophobic. She makes for the exit and leaves us to watch snippets of video before returning as a “trickster, like her daddy.” She demonstrates her rope skills but really, she just wants to get to her point, the differential “between you and me.” Her grappling faith calls out to us from underneath the rubble of chairs.

In Pittman’s “Black Life Chord Changes,” part of Out-Front! Festival from the Pioneers Go East Collective, the work spans day to night, and the liminal spaces in-between, at a decidedly more sustainable pace for parsing themes of resistance and rest, in life and the afterlife. A meditative phrase where movement and song slowly accumulate gives way to another section of smooth, swaggering hips and shoulders. Stark and graphic lighting by Tuce Yasak casts Pittman’s shadow up the side walls and puts her in curious, partially visible relationships to illuminated angles. We learn it is “after the end of the world,” and are treated to a mini lecture on Audre Lorde and the creative power of dark, ancient places (inside us). A delightful dissection of her favorite superhero Blade, a vampire hunter portrayed by Wesley Snipes in the Marvel movie trilogy, gets her visibly excited. Sitting cross-legged, she tells us about his duality, stressing the most important thing about him is his ability to move through light—the penultimate freedom afforded to him due to his status as a dhampir, a creature not quite human nor fully vampire. There is humor throughout, including a list of what she needs to do her own work of killing vampires and the fog she sprays out of an aerosol can around her to create mystery. The cheekiness adds to the surreal ritual of forming a dirt body on a panel of silver melamine and lends more gravitas to the sacred ring dance she performs to commune with ancestors. Undulating her spine, she parses the Black feminist claim of “consciousness as a sphere of freedom,” before laying it out for us plain: “Black labor is sacred, and our defiance is holy.”

Auto-fiction hovered over these performances. All of the artists deftly blended elements of biography and self with created characters. But ultimately, they leaned more heavily on fantasy to propose new ways to endure, or find freedom from, our limiting realities.

*The annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals that provides a platform for artists to be seen by presenters booking theaters around the country. The experience is like being shot out of the new year cannon into a January marathon for artists, presenters, and audiences.