FIVE

Interdisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome’s multipart project, Black Magic, is currently on view at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. Black Magic is a holistic reflection on agency, Blackness, and the futurity of intersectional identities and oppression.

FIVE is a multimedia performance that abstracts the art of Vogue Femme, a dance form that originated in the African-American and Latino LGBTQ communities 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, musicians improvise an interactive soundtrack. Newsome maps the movement patterns of dancers during the live performances and transforms the collected data into digital neoactionist drawings in real time on a screen above the performance.