The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Summer Performance Grant to André M. Zachery for his solo performance “Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends“.

André M. Zachery is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist of Haitian and African American descent and is a scholar, researcher, and technologist with a BFA from Ailey/Fordham University and an MFA in Performance & Interactive Media Arts from CUNY/Brooklyn College. As the artistic director of Renegade Performance Group his practice, research, and community engagement artistically focused on merging choreography, technology, and Black cultural practices through multimedia work. André is a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Gregory Millard Fellow in Choreography and a 2019 Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Choreography.

His works through RPG have been presented domestically and internationally, receiving support through several residencies, awards, and commissions. These have included the  LMCC Arts Center on Governors Island, Dance/NYC Coronavirus Relief Fund, CUNY Dance Initiative, Performance Project Residency at University Settlement, ChoreoQuest Residency at Restoration Arts Brooklyn, 3LD Art & Technology Center, HarvestWorks and a Jerome-supported Movement Research AIR. Awarded grants have been from the Brooklyn Arts Council, Harlem Stage Fund for New Work, and a Slate Property SPACE Award. Commissions have come from the Brooklyn Museum, Five Myles/BRIC Biennial, and Danspace Project.

Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends is André M Zachery’s choreographic solo self-examination of Black masculinity through history, memory, text, poetry and geography, with improvisations & textures by sound artist Sadah Espii Proctor, dramaturgy by producing director Ayinde Jean-Baptiste and original compositions by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist avery r. young. It begins from Zachery’s youth in 1980-90’s Chicago, as his personal narrative intersects with three legendary figures: Fred Hampton, Ben (Benji) Wilson and Harold Washington. Guided in part by the oracular voice of Chicago ancestor laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, the performer grapples with the wake of these three men --respectively a revolutionary, an athletic phenom and a post-Civil Rights era politician, all felt, in their moments as messiahs. Against Gravity... is a chance to unpack how the expectations and pressures cast by their lives, deaths and pursuant mythologies shaped Black men who came of age in the city they left.

“As an interdisciplinary artist, my work focuses on contemporary Black and African Diaspora aesthetics and expressions. This project will be an evening-length multimedia solo performance unpacking the lives, tragic deaths and mythologies of Fred Hampton, Harold Washington and Ben Wilson. Fred Hampton was the chairman of the Black Panther Party and was assassinated in December 1969 by the Chicago Police. In 1983, Harold Washington was elected the first Black Mayor of the most segregated city in America, stymied at most every turn by entrenched racists & corrupt politicos; he died of a heart-attack at his desk a week after re-election in 1987. Ben Wilson (Benji) was the number-one high school basketball player in America, shot and killed in an act of street violence the day before his senior season at Simeon High School in Chicago.”

“This solo problematizes the iconography of these three men: a Black power revolutionary, a post-Civil Rights era politician and a superstar athlete. While there are many discussions on what Black masculinity can be, this project considers how my personal narrative has intersected with specific figures from the place where I was born and raised. Through performance, I will explore how my experiences & my body are both enmeshed in the weight of these specific histories.”

“In many ways, these three men continue to represent dashed hopes and dreams of Black Chicago and, more broadly, Black people in America. These legacies and lives cut short beg these questions: What is Black manhood measured against? Do we have space to fail?”

“This project is an internal reckoning of self-reflection and is a departure from my previous works that were outward facing considerations of contemporary Black existence. Exposing the ways my personal narrative is enmeshed within these mythologies is a new step for my creative process & offering. My goal is to unpack how the lives and deaths of these three figures created aspirational images/ expectations that weighed on me and others coming into self-identification as Black men in the city, in ways resonant with the broader pressures on Black men in the United States over time.”

André has worked on significant projects across artistic mediums as a choreographer, media designer, and consultant with artists such as Daniel Bernard Roumain, Cynthia Hopkins, Davalois Fearon, Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE, Arin Maya, Rags & Ribbons, The Clever Agency, Kendra Foster, Manhattan School of Music, Burwell & Sasser and Spike Lee.

André is an Assistant Arts Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts in the Dance Department at NYU. As a scholar, he has been a member of panels, led group talks, facilitated discussions, and presented research on a myriad of topics including Afrofuturism, African Diaspora practices, and philosophies, Black cultural aesthetics, technology in art and performance, and expanding the boundaries of art making within the community. He has been a panelist and presented his research at institutions such as Duke University, Brooklyn College, University of Virginia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is an advisory board member of the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado. André has taught at Brooklyn College and been a guest faculty member at the dance programs of Florida State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, The Ohio State University, the University of California Los Angeles, and the University of California Riverside.

Please visit Andre’s Facebook, Instagram, X and website for more information.