Candice D'Meza (photo by Mikala Gibson)
The work is a creative breakthrough for the multi-faceted D’Meza, one of the most interesting writer-director-actors living and working in Houston’s theater community, and those with an open mind will find the show’s blend of live performance, music and video stimulating, provocative — and definitely fun.
Both science fiction and Afrofuturism — an artistic movement that explores and reimagines the history and culture of the African diaspora using the literary and ocular tropes of science fiction — came into D’Meza’s creative life when, during the trying months of the pandemic, she discovered the work of the groundbreaking science fiction author N.K. Jemisin.
“I couldn’t get enough of it,” says D’Meza of Jemisin’s expansive reimagining of the genre, and how Afrofuturism reflected how Black people view themselves across time and space. It all aligned with ideas D’Meza had held for years.
Around this same time, she was introduced Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s concept of Harriet Tubman as a time-traveler whose prophetic visions helped her to escape slavery. “Tubman touched the future for information, and we look back at her to guide us forward,” says D’Meza. “There is a very interdimensional conversation happening.”
A Maroon’s Guide to Time and Space brings that interdimensional conversation to the stage.
Co-directed by D’Meza with fellow traveler Mikala Gibson, the cast includes Crystal Rae, Brittny Rush and Rennette Brown, with Rae taking on the role of different iterations of Tubman. “They were perfect for this work because they can embody the weird,” says D’Meza of this trio of adventurous actors. “They’re insanely creative and bold in a way that traditional theater doesn’t ask them to be.”
D'Meza
Three digital characters engage in dialogue with the onstage actors, including one described by D’Meza as a “sentient binary code” who guides Tubman in her perilous journey. The staging takes inspiration from the cosmology of the West African ethnic group the Dogon; the set design mirrors the geographic location of the Dogon in Mali, and the lighting is configured to match the area’s constellation. Throughout the performance, the audience is encouraged to engage with the actors and onstage events, including a techno dance party DJed by Tubman.
D’Meza solo parents two boys, ages 12 and 15, and a 15-month-old daughter (D’Meza found time to write the play’s script on her phone while her daughter slept after breastfeeding). She takes great pride in sharing how much her boys enjoyed this exciting, seriously strange work created by their mom. “My older son said, ‘Youwrote this? That’s weird. This is really cool!” says D’Meza. “I think I got some points there.”
A Maroon’s Guide to Time and Space runs May 26-June 17 at MATCH.
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Houston Ballet Soloist Naazir Muhammad with artists of Houston Ballet rehearsing Justin Peck’s 'Under the Folding Sky' (photo by Lawrence Elizabeth Knox)
Peck, 35, is certainly an artist concerned with “the forward motion” of dance. His brand new work for Houston Ballet Under the Folding Sky, which premieres May 25 on the ballet’s summer program Divergence, draws equal inspiration from the James Turrell’s Twilight Epiphany Skyspace at Rice University and music from act three of The Photographer, a rare gem of a score by Philip Glass originally composed in 1982 for a mixed-media performance about the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge. It’s Peck’s second commission by Houston Ballet.
Justin Peck (photo by Ryan Pfluger)
To create the work, Peck came to rehearsals with Houston Ballet with a general structure for each of the three sections of Glass’s score. “Once I bring that to the table, it’s really a process of being in the room with the dancers, and having a back and forth exchange with them,” explains Peck. As rehearsals progress, the language of the dance evolves.
Peck has wanted to make a dance to The Photographer for nearly a decade. “It’s an amazing, danceable score but that third act — it’s a banger,” says Peck, who worked with Glass’s publishers to restore and revise the score for performance by the Houston Ballet Orchestra. “It has this building, propulsive quality, as it gains speed over 20 minutes.”
In addition to matching the build of Glass’s music, Peck wanted to evoke the incremental changes in artificial and natural light inside Turrell’s Skyspace. The dance begins accordingly with just one dancer, then two, then four and so forth, slowly building up to what Peck describes as “a massive corps de ballet” of 24 dancers. “It’s about the feeling that slow transition gives to the viewer as they’re taking in the installation,” says Peck. “I wanted to create a dance experience inspired by that very thing.”
Now married to former Miami City Ballet principal dancer Patricia Delgado, and the father of a 14-month-old daughter, Peck’s varied and extensive resume includes his current role as Resident Choreographer for the New York City Ballet, choreographing the 2018 Broadway revival of Carousel, and reimagining Jerome Robbins’s iconic Jets and Sharks dances for Steven Spielberg’s 2022 film West Side Story. Given the range of his creative work, it’s no surprise Peck feels now is an especially exciting time for ballet as an art form.
“You can track how far ballet has progressed by looking Houston Ballet and the range of commissions they’ve performed in the past year,” says Peck. “From very narrative work to my piece, which is a much more abstract work that feels almost like an art installation, it just shows such a range of what the artists are doing and what the company can support in a single season.”
Also on the program for Divergence is Aszure Barton’s Angular Momentum, which pays homage to Houston and is set to a score by Mason Bates incorporating archival NASA recordings; and Stanton Welch’s Divergence, one of the ballet’s signature works, with music by Georges Bizet.
Peck with artists of Houston Ballet (photo by Lawrence Elizabeth Knox)
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