Preview: Malik Nashad Sharpe on Tour with $elfie$

This autumn, Malik Nashad Sharpe is on tour with $elfie$. This is the third work in a series built around understandings of Black and Queer aesthetics performed against our current political moment. Malik performs his choreographic projects under the artistic name marikiscrycrycry.

$elfie$ suggests a new relationship with the emotional landscape amidst the intense highs and lows of the body’s wear and tear. Malik’s work is suitably polarised, inhabiting a world of unabashed, unapologetic joyousness, the advent of political melancholia and ambivalence to extreme forms of desire and violence.

An unravelling performance featuring Malik alongside dancer Kam Wan (Dalston Ballet), $elfie$ holds the mirror to the audience and at the same time extricates itself into a resistant creative force – and that force, according to Malik, says no to the stranglehold of authoritarian powers on our present and future aesthetics. Such work acts as a springboard for themes reflecting and responding to our times.

Says Malik: “My work is really concerned with the formal tools of making choreography, and challenging its perceived limits and edges, which is why I think, my work is so intense. I am interested in using the formal elements of choreography in order to interrogate contemporary political, social, and emotional issues”.

Malik Nashad Sharpe was born in Long Island, New York – a British-Caribbean-American. He was raised in the US but has returned to London, where he has strong family roots, to live and work. Following a strict upbringing within a working class family, Malik graduated from Williams College Massachusetts with the highest honours in experimental dance and live art. He also has a diploma from Laban, where he was awarded the Simone Michele Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography.