Black Magic: FIVE

FIVE is a multimedia performance that abstracts the art of Vogue Femme, a dance form originating from the African-American and Latino LGBTQ community of 1970s Harlem. In the performance five dancers represent the five elements of Vogue Femme—hands, catwalk, floor performance, spin dips, and duck-walking. As each dancer takes the floor, a hip-hop M.C., an operatic vocalist, a black gospel choir, and five musicians improvise an interactive soundtrack, building to a carefully structured crescendo of sound and movement. Using custom made motion-tracking technology, created from a combination of creative coding and video game hardware, Newsome maps the movement patterns of dancers during the live performances and transform the collected data into digital neoactionist drawings in real-time on a screen above the performance.

BLACK MAGIC is generously supported by the William Penn Foundation with additional support from New Music USA and the MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Additional support provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and Partners for New Performance.