On Oct. 3, director Shamel Pitts will bring his newest work, Marks of RED, to the Power Center in Ann Arbor, though his artistic journey long before he had the words to explain it.
“I have always been dancing,” Pitts said. “When I was young my mother would throw a lot of parties at home and I was always up late dancing with adults until the early hours of the morning. So my experience as a kid with family and with adults has always sort of been grounded in community through dancing.”
As he grew up, his love of dance only evolved. Pitts took on formal dance training at Laguardia High School in New York, where he studied ballet and modern dance techniques. There, he became drawn to expression and the emotional capacity of movement.
“I was always still dancing at night,” Pitts said. “[I] had a huge curiosity for the arrangement and the organization of bodies and space and what we can communicate through the expression of our bodies amongst each other.”
To date, Marks of RED is Pitts’ largest work. It is the first in which he is not a performer himself as well. On the inspiration behind the performance, Pitts lays out the four words that came to mind when conceiving this work: ‘butoh,’ ‘sumo,’ ‘techno’ and ‘womb’.
“With these four words, we created a world in Marks of RED that sort of encompasses those initial ideas,” Pitts said.
‘Womb’ is seemingly the biggest throughline in this work. Constantly and continuously inspired by the women in his life, specifically Black women, the show draws on the idea of femininity. Pitts also considers ‘womb’ in the sense of it being a place of origin, and explores the idea of “oneness being relational.”
“There is this real surge of the divine feminine,” Pitts explains on the topic of Marks of RED. “Its also about Black embodiment and aliveness.”
Because he is not performing, Pitts has gotten the opportunity to dive into the role of director and wholly observe his performers and crew in their element. The performance centers six women of color, as well as six different designers working behind the scenes.
“I value immensely the people I work with and the skills they bring to the work,” Pitts said. “The work is only fully actualized within the totality of its parts.”
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Of the performers themselves, Pitts speaks life into them. Pitts met them through a range of different places, making their backgrounds in dance vast and lending Pitts an array of possibilities with them.
“They are so alive and pronounced and incredibly distinct from each other,” Pitts said. “I wasn’t looking for something homogenous. I was really curious about each of these performers, and trying to get a sense of how they can come together with their differences and still be coherent.”
As an artist, Pitts believes his work to consist of a message, a challenge and a gift.
“I hope the audience comes in with an openness to receive an experience that may be unfamiliar,” Pitts said, “but hopefully provokes thought, promotes feeling and allows them to have an experience that is sensorial and transformative.”
You can buy tickets for Marks of RED on the UMS website, or by calling the ticket office at 734-764-2538.
