'Black Holes' tells
the history of the universe
from the big bang right through
to the universe's death,
and it's a speculative fiction.
It's a science fiction
so it's not real, a real history
and it's a way of us
also speaking about racism
and blowing up
our personal experiences of racism
into a kind of cosmic mythic scale.
Yeah, so we kind of use
Afrofuturism as a kind of tool
for displacing these narratives
that can feel quite
dystopian a lot of the time
and we kind of remake a world
where actually these narratives
kind of take centre stage through
poetry and text and movement
just kind of squash all this
matter together into a piece.
We, the pocket of air, are an accident.
And then this accident is where
something magical started to happen.
Afrofuturism is science fiction
that deals with the black experience.
It can be a way of
imagining better futures.
It can also be a way of commenting
on the sort of present and past dystopias
that black people have lived.
And it's rooted in literature and
music but not so much within dance.
I mean it's kind of starting now,
like this kind of wave of Afrofuturism.
And so we were
both really interested to see
what about movement and its potential
could we bring to
these discourses on Afrofuturism,
particularly from the UK because I think
a lot of it tends to come out of the US
and it's a very different
experience of being marginalised.
Gravity decided to intervene.
She could see a bit of chaos and
she thought she better go and sort it out.
So she came and started
pulling different atoms together
and this created a site of energy.
It got very hot just like it did
towards the end of the universe.
It got very hot.
We're making a stage show
where we can both exist in
and play and experiment and express
and voice all these experiences.
There's little question marks
I think, that we like putting in there
that's like, what is at stake
or like what is really the impact of
these experiences on
two bodies that in that moment
are also trying to represent,
to a certain extent, more than ourselves.
People also said that they learned
something from watching this
and they found it kind of instructive
and it made them think about
things that they hadn't thought about.
I was orbiting with some planets,
dead centre of the Whirlpool Galaxy.
I look around and all I see is
this space junk flying towards me.
Prehistoric metal being
rammed down my throat.
Slicing and dicing
through the innards of time.
When did it become my job to clean up?
