Work
Selected
Belmont Baby Dolls: Spirit Dolls (2020)
in collaboration with Brianna McCarthy
Trinidad Carnival, Port of Spain
with Makeda and Nyah Love Thomas, Lyndon Gill, Mari Pitkänen, Angelique Nixon, Arnaldo James, Jamie Philbert, Jade Drakes, Shay Alexander, Isabel Dennis, Cecile Pemberton and Eva Thomas, Patriann Edwards, Arielle John, and Kwayera Cunningham-Archer.
“Spirit Dolls” sets its foundation on the traditional elements of the Baby Doll Mas. Materials are a mix of African textiles, European lace, and fabrics commonly found in Caribbean homes - florals and cotton prints. In this way, we are interested in a “Caribbean” Doll, with all those respective cultural influences, and moving towards something that is unique; self-defined. And while the aesthetic is strong, this mas is less about what a Baby Doll looks like, and more about what Baby Doll mas can do. Spirit dolls act as vessels for beings of powerful spirits. In this performance, Carnival is the ritual to invoke the spirit of the Doll; to open a path to the impossible.
"When Dolls Dance" in "Black Dance: My Voice, My Practice".
READ “Spirit Dolls” at CADD 2020 Fluid Black::Dance Back
SEE "Baby Doll Mas' Old & New Interpretations at “The Old Yard” at the University of the West Indies, Centre for Creative & Festival Arts
"Spirit Dolls" for Trinidad & Tobago Carnival, 2020. Photo by Abigail Hadeed.
Belmont Baby Dolls: Carnival Baby (2019)
in collaboration with Shannon Lewis
Trinidad & Tobago Carnival - Port of Spain
with Makeda and Nyah Love Thomas, Jade Drakes, Arnaldo James, Olubusola Chung, Shanya Springer, Sophie Bufton, Adeline Gregoire, Amanda McIntyre, Jarula Wegner, and Shannon Lewis.
“Carnival Baby” - eleven MASterful performers whose work “traces the roots of this Mas as one in which women assert control over their sexuality, their womanhood, their motherhood; to assert their “performative identities” against interpretations that would deny both their agency and their pleasure”. (Vaz-Deville). Belmont Baby Dolls extend this ethos throughout their lives and engage this embodied practice as a way to examine how gender and race have shaped and continue to shape this ritual, explore sexuality in the lives of Caribbean girls and transgressive sexuality performed publicly by women, and the way the tradition helps to revitalize spirits. We are the dolls, their mothers, their sisters, their aunts, their lovers...
READ "The Return of the Baby Doll" in Caribbean Beat
"Carnival Baby" for Trinidad & Tobago Carnival, 2019. Photo by Arnaldo James.
The Light Fantastical
Creative Capital Awardee, Makeda Thomas uses live performance, text, and installation in The Light Fantastical, an open series of artistic explorations of the metaphors for art and technology that come out of Afrofuturist culture - or more appropriately, “Caribbean Futurisms - which considers how Caribbean cultural forms navigate time and space, and innovate new histories, sciences and aesthetics. Each performance, each iteration of the work exists in multiple variations, with each variation being characterized by the improvisations of the performers. In this way, the work is imbued with its own autonomous power that engages a more present performer - a future performer - in moments of infinite imaginations and re-creation.
“I have questions about a future diasporic Caribbean culture; an Afrofuturist culture in which the body and how/why it moves is at the center. The body is how we experience our universe and as a dance artist, it’s particularly important to me that the body does not disappear among technology. I’m interested in those ancient and future technologies that open a way to not only imagine those parts of our selves that we may not remember, but that allows us to Unearth; to dance and move in a way that takes us to new states of what it means to be human.”
The Light Fantastical (2019)
Artistic Direction & Choreography Makeda Thomas
Performance Makeda Thomas and Dyane Harvey Salaam
Installation & Stage Design Makeda Thomas
Video Animation Tim Wetherell
Sound Design Keshav Singh
As with the future, "The Light Fantastical" is concerned with the past:
When fire destroyed my 100 year old Brooklyn home last year - and with it, not only the entire “analog” archive of my twenty year career in dance, but all of the research and documentation for my newest work...More than before, I realized embodied knowledges - not as ephemeral - but as the only true materiality. What is more tangible than a living, breathing body in movement? Paper, photographs, costumes, hard drives, handwritten notes, a collections, dv tapes, dvds - they all burn and to turn to ash. But in the lived, moving body, is all that is, ever was, and ever will be. My current focus is on this relationship between art practice and archival structures.
Thomas performs in a duet with the eponymous Dyane Harvey-Salaam. The Light Fantastical lives in a luminescent landscape concerned with archival performativities and the links between past knowledge and future imagination, offering a futurist reading of the past, and a historical reading of the future.
rekindling: powerful magic in a mysterious place (2017)
a project of “The Light Fantastical”
Performed by Makeda Thomas.
rekindling: powerful magic in a mysterious place is a solo structured improvisation that takes place among four ancestral wire figures, in a pool of light, and through a complete moon cycle.
