As an introduction to the practice of Malik Nashad Sharpe AKA Marikiscrycrycry, the host of our next online crit, Almanac presents Mise-en-Crise, a video in collaboration between Marikiscrycrycry and Elena Isolini, alongside a text by Hélène Selam Kleih. Commissioned by Center for Human Rights in the Arts, New York, Mise-en-Crise is a film that considers choreography as both the site and the scenography of hope, performatively carved from crisis and rebellion. Playing with the theatrical concept of mise-en-scène, this work uses dance as a material tool and texture for elemental seduction and strategic unruliness.

Vis-a-vis a Pandaemonium: social death, policing and the politics of performance.

by Hélène Selam Kleih


We are gathered here today to speak on existing. The catch-22 of being. Of wanting. Of freedom.

What price do we pay

Mourning and melancholia, nostalgic for a life before, we encounter space used for recreation, for liberation, for monotony, for our usual. Hearts flickering, my community too ! Pre-pandemic wanderings, perusing abandoned space, the desperation in the search, the finding of joy in bleakness. The elation of our escape, and the swooping deflation, the mundane crashing betwixt. We run through fields ardently, a parody of departure, a ruse of rescue. Reminiscent of slasher scene’s and drive-by’s, we are not reticent. A fantasy charting the high of community, and the come-down of society – we shatter the illusion of routine and rigidity, the Uber aux the memento of time, of dusk and dawn, and order is toppled, rituals are our law, belonging is no longer sporadic and identity marginalisation is an abstraction left to the other.

It is not our duty to convey the horror. We live in our truth.

We live not to be consumed. How do we define the depoliticization of black bodies – malleable, there are no borders to intersectionality. Collapsing those lines, Malik is not here to project a homogeneity, rather we are all “protagonists” in their story, the Mise-en-Crise of the individual and the collective. Intentionally fluid, the choreography tells that “everyone has a different quality, but we are all doing the same thing together – let’s do it together, but in our own way.’’ Movement investigates the difference within blackness, the difference in the motions of our existence, how we “live it, do it, be it.” The focus is not reserved for one – movement wavers between chaotic synchronicity of the many and the few, our attention converges on the We, deliberate in creating a world that seduces and leaves the We to embellish. Malik catechizes, “how does dance stitch that information, this crisis into a visual field, how does dance get expanded in that frame?”

the We enacts a social death through performance – but what is performance and for whom are We performing?

Interrogating a moment in a pandemic, we grapple with a life no longer practiced but one that is always sought, where rituals of safety and of sanctity no longer save us – movement has been stifled and rendered mute, an imprint of a previous life. Chasing a moment of a time before, a night before, the chase exhausts an already collapsed state.

When our space was already always so temporary, how do we take up space in the Now?

This is the crisis of our moment – when will we dance Again ?

Malik Nashad Sharpe is an artist working with choreography. Creating primarily underneath the alias Marikiscrycrycry, he creates performances that are formally engaged with the construction of atmosphere, affect, and dramaturgy.

His works have been presented internationally and across contexts including Battersea Arts Centre (UK), ICA (UK), Gessnerallee (CH), The Yard (UK), Betty Nansen (DK), The Place (UK), Schauspielhaus (AT), Kampnagel (DE), Dansehallerne (DK), MAI (CA), Theatre La Chapelle (CA), Rich Mix (UK), Tramway (UK), Theatre in the Mill (UK), Nottingham Contemporary (UK), Quarterhouse Folkestone (UK), Beursshcouwburg (BE), Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts (UK), Cambridge Junction (UK), EWerk (DE), Centre for Human Rights in the Arts (USA), CCA Glasgow (UK), amongst others. His newest work High Bed Lower Castle will premiere at FTA (CA) in 2022. As a movement director, he has worked on the creative teams of Fairview (Young Vic), The Glow (Royal Court), Two-Character Play (Hampstead Theatre), Effigies of Wickedness (Gate/English National Opera), Scandaltown (Lyric Hammersmith) and he has held artistic residencies at Sadlers Wells (UK), Barbican Open Labs (UK), Primary (UK), and CCN Caen (FR).

He has performed and modeled for Telfar SS18 (UK), Charles Jeffrey at LFW20 (UK), Vivienne Westwood at PFW AW21-22 (FR), and has been featured in publications including British Vogue, American Vogue, Vogue Polska, Dazed, Dazed Beauty, Crack Magazine, Howlround Theatre Commons, i-D, Nowness, Love Magazine, Bricks, amongst others. He was named by Attitude Magazine as a Rising Star in Dance in 2019, and on the Forbes 30 Under 30 List for his leading contribution to the arts and culture in Europe.

He graduated with a BA in Dance (Highest Honours) from Williams College in 2014, and holds a Diploma in Contemporary Dance from Trinity Laban where he won the Simone Michelle Award for Outstanding Choreography. He is currently an Associate Artist at The Place, and a studio resident of Somerset House Studios. He lives in London, UK.


The project is supported by Arts Council England.