An Artist Talk(s) with Marikiscrycrycry (tanzhaus nrw)

Balindile ka Ngcobo will moderate an artist talk with Malik Nashad Sharpe (Marikiscrycrycry) following the performance of “Hang Time”.

Following up on the world premiere of Malik Nashad Sharpe’s “Hang Time”: https://tanzhaus-nrw.de/en/event/2026/10/hang-time

Hang Time is a work about suspension, and about lifelines. In the afterlife of historical violence, Black/diasporic communities and identities become suspended in time: as Other, as subaltern, as Strange (Fruit). ‘Afterlife’ here means the wake: the traces left behind in the absence of what was, what is inherited and passed down, and how we learn to live, even thrive, in these spectres. In the afterlife of profound loss, bodies and bodies-of-work become sacred, contested and abstracted spaces. Our historic, cultural, personal entanglements become a braid, or a rope; a lifeline cast overboard, pulling us towards ourselves.

Artist and scholar Balindile ka Ngcobo speaks with Malik Nashad Sharpe about how grief is metabolised and alchemised through movement; in the physical moving of individual and collective bodies in performance and in movement across time and space. How does radical, emancipatory joy break the surface of hardened masculinities? How do soca, bouyon, séance, ritual and gathering work as technologies of survival? And what do abstraction, horror and fantasy offer such nuanced stagings of broader Black culture, and Caribbean culture in particular?