Park Avenue Armory presents the second program in its Making Space Public Programming Series: Antagonisms: A Gathering, Saturday, June 1, 2024 from 1pm to 7pm. This day-long symposium is led by playwright and poet Claudia Rankine, who has organized this event to examine the poetics of disagreement through panels discussions, artistic interventions, and investigations of group dynamics, starting with a performance of Guggenheim fellow and choreographer Shamel Pitts’ boxing-ring inspired duet 'An Essence of Touch of RED.'

The gathering opens with Pitts’ 'An Essence of Touch of RED' at 1pm, performed by Tushrik Fredericks and Shamel Pitts. Part of his ongoing Red Series with Brooklyn-based arts collective TRIBE, the work is a duet for two Black men set inside a contemporary boxing ring. The dancers imbue this boxed-in site with an intense energy drawn from the power of vulnerability, effeminacy, and the healing that occurs when Black men are allowed to soften, together. This sets the scene for audiences to experience anticipation, energy, and collective softening of a boxing ring and to reframe their expectations of time, space, and normative identity.

Subsequently, three hour-long panels hosted by conveners Claudia Rankine, acclaimed cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, and Indian scholar and postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, respectively, will question the themes brought up by the performance and framed by Lorde and Baldwin’s conversation. Additional participants include: poet and novelist Dionne Brand; Queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs; specialist in African American culture and a prominent scholar in the field of race and sexuality studies Robert Reid-Pharr; writer, professor, and researcher in Black Studies Christina Sharpe; actress, playwright, and National Humanities Medal recipient Anna Deavere Smith, among others.

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