DARKMATTER
Concept and choreography by Cherish Menzo. Created and performed by Cherish Menzo and Camilo Mejía Cortés.
Presented by Under the Radar and Performance Space New York as part of the 2026 Under the Radar Festival.
Performance Space New York, 150 First Avenue (Fourth Floor), New York, NY 10009.
January 13, 2026 - January 18, 2026
Photo Credit: Radar Festival, Bas de Brouwer, Yaqine Hamzaoui, Yema Gieskes.
As we entered Performance Space New York’s Keith Haring Theatre, we were greeted by an image that made time feel torn, Doctor Who-style. The question wasn’t “When are we?” It was “Who gets to have a future?”
Two figures, one feminine-presenting (Cherish Menzo) and one masculine-presenting (Camilo Mejía Cortés), are rendered both hyper-visible and unknowable. Their faces are erased under mirrored masks with no features. Over black jeans and black hoodies, their bodies are partially sealed in black vinyl, with Cortés’s chest exposed in stark but tender relief as he lies prone on the floor. Skin, unmistakably human. Vinyl, unmistakably artificial. Menzo kneels in front of Cortés and smears his chest with a black liquid, slowly, lovingly, as if anointing and undoing him at the same time.
They are framed by a pristine white marley floor inside an otherwise black box space, with stiff white banners hanging behind them, smudged with swathes of black and grey that evoke Jean-Michel Basquiat’s neo-expressionist grit. Upstage right, a pile of industrial rubber strips sits like enormous viscera or brain coral, unignorable, not quite metaphor and not quite prop. The tableau reads as a cyberpunk, rivethead, Afro-futurist pietà, charged by the industrial hum of an unseen engine, then stranger still by the chatter of an excited audience settling into their seats. A sanctuary with a motor running.
If I’m reaching for Doctor Who here, it’s because the work itself insists on time as a material. Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor and Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor carry Black British diasporic sensibilities into the role, not by “representing” Blackness as an idea, but by carrying it as lived intelligence, as presence, as an inheritance that cannot be separated from the state’s violence or the state’s imagination. Their Doctors move through timelines where empire is not a subplot, it is the architecture. Their Doctors move through timelines where empire is not a subplot, it is the architecture. They travel with the knowledge that bodies are policed differently in every era, and DARKMATTER moves with that same memory. It is not interested in explaining itself for white comfort. It is interested in what the body remembers even when history insists on amnesia.
Choreographer Cherish Menzo is based in Amsterdam, but it is impossible to encounter this opening image and not feel the gravitational pull of the transatlantic slave trade and the ongoing denigration of Black bodies, not as a distant past but as a living system. In the U.S., that system has never stopped iterating. The country’s “original sin” is not an antique. It is a machine that keeps getting upgrades, including under the Trump regime, through ICE raids that treat due process as optional, through families ripped apart, through Black migrants and other Global Majority (BIPOC) migrants swept into custody and transferred far from home, and through constitutional violations and uses of force that can end in detention, deportation, or death. This is not abstract. The Guardian has already reported at least eight deaths in 2026 tied to federal immigration agents’ killings and fatalities in ICE custody, and anti-Blackness is part of the current that makes that machine run.
So yes, despite the gentleness and sanctity of the tableau, it activates rage and sorrow. That is part of the point. However, what’s fantastically bracing and galvanizing about DARKMATTER is that it refuses to treat grief as a resting place. It begins in the murk, in abyssal pressure, in the Challenger Deep, and then keeps climbing, toward air, toward orbit, toward the ancestral and celestial power contained by Black and brown bodies. It is a gorgeous celebration of those bodies, and yet never forgets there is a universe beneath the surface.
Notes from the Abyss
I’m a non-Black reviewer, coming to this as a brown Southeast Asian person, and DARKMATTER draws on a Black diasporic reference constellation. I’m writing from a place of respect and admiration, with an awareness that Black artists and Black audiences are the only ones with the right to name what this work means for the Black diaspora. My aim here is more modest, and I hope I earn it: to describe how the piece landed for me in the room, how it moved, what it insisted on, and how its sources illuminated Menzo’s vision.
Normally, I’d rather describe what I saw, tell you how it moved through my body, and trust you to meet me there. With DARKMATTER, the source material is so fascinating, and so deliberately chosen, that it feels worth indulging in a little dramaturgical analysis. Not as a decoding exercise. More like reading the tide tables, because Menzo has built a whole cosmology here, and it rewards attention.
Riptide to Orbit
We have to talk about the movement, because it is the engine, the undertow, the riptide. Menzo’s physical score reads as anti-Butoh in the anti-hero sense: not anti as in against, anti as in a shadow-twin. Like Butoh, it finds beauty in ugliness and meaning in distortion. Yet the temperature is different. Where Butoh often moves in meditative calm, Menzo’s choreography is deliberately provocative and activating, unsettling the boundary between audience and performer by making spectatorship itself feel unstable.
The movement is percussive, sharp, fast, athletic. It snaps, it ricochets, it surges. Bodies become instruments, then become vessels, then become something closer to weather. Again and again you get the feeling of pressure changes, surface breaks, the body breaching, then getting pulled back under, then breaching again, stubbornly.
This velocity often works in direct challenge to the show’s adaptation of chopped and screwed, the Houston hip-hop remix technique in which tempo is sharply reduced and pitch is lowered. The sound drags you downward, into silt and pressure. The bodies fight for altitude. The friction is not a mistake, it is the point. A struggle made formal, oceanic pull versus celestial reach, containment versus liberation, silence versus declaration.
There is also a deliberate provocation in how the dance refuses the “safe distance” contract we’re trained to expect in contemporary performance. Not in the cheap sense of shock, but in the deeper sense of refusing to let the audience remain merely a camera. You watch, and you realize you are being implicated by the act of watching. You are made to feel the line between witnessing and consuming, and then the line starts to blur, like ink in water.
That is why the ocean-to-orbit spine matters. The piece keeps asking what it takes to move from the deep, from the undertow, from the places built to hold you down, into air, into lift, into the wide cold truth of the stars.
The Transcendence Trope, Upgraded
The idea that you can transcend the body by transforming it into its “true energy state,” is classic sci-fi. It has been used beautifully, and it has been used badly. It is the kind of trope that can turn into a pyramid scheme in under five minutes, and yes, Dianetics is sitting right there as Exhibit A, infamously selling transcendence as personal upgrade and profit engine.
What DARKMATTER does is sharper, and frankly, more useful. It treats transcendence as collective declaration. Not escape from the body because the body is shameful, but transformation of the body into what it already is, a repository of ancestral power, a generator of cosmic power, a refusal to be reduced to property, spectacle, or data. If the regime’s machinery wants Black bodies contained, managed, made small, Menzo’s choreography insists on Black bodies as expansive, untamable, and in conversation with forces much older than any border.
After the abyss, the piece starts speaking in expanding orbits, not as escape, but as claim.
Tidal Charts & Star Maps
The musical world of DARKMATTER is not just accompaniment, it is argument. It folds in a deliberately built constellation of references, each one doing its own political and poetic labor. These sources do not feel like a reading list stapled onto a dance. They function like navigation, like sonar pings, like stars you steer by when you’ve lost the shore.
William Grant Still’s 1949 opera Troubled Island (with a libretto begun by Langston Hughes and completed by Verna Arvey) centers the Haitian Revolution. The resonance here is not “history lesson,” it is lineage, revolt as discipline, liberation as something fought for, and then fought over, and then fought for again.
Then there is Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1895 poem, “We Wear the Mask.” It is a poem you think you know, until you hear it in a room like this and remember its august power. Dunbar names the violence of compulsory legibility, the demand that Black people translate pain into something palatable, something the world can consume without having to change.
In DARKMATTER, that idea is not presented as literature, it is presented as physics. Masking becomes a pressure system. It is what you do when the environment is hostile, when the air is thin, when the wrong expression can make you a target. One of the work’s songs, “Mask is the surface,” wrestles with this impossible equation by braiding fragments of Dunbar with fragments from Ephraim Asili’s “Points On A Space Age,” and with fragments from “My Virtual Pussy, My Artificial Lungs,” a conversation between Juliana Huxtable and Anaïs Duplan in BLACKSPACE. That juxtaposition matters. It widens “mask” beyond a social performance and into a whole ecology of survival, the public face, the digital self, the altered body, the technologies we graft onto ourselves to keep breathing.
There is a phrase from self-defense training that’s useful here, “choosing to comply.” It is not consent. It is a tactical decision under duress, a way of staying alive in an encounter where the rules are already rigged. Under white supremacy, masking can function like that, compliance-as-shelter, compliance-as-cover, compliance-as the narrowest available path to tomorrow. You survive, and that survival is real, and the cost can still be immense.
DARKMATTER refuses to romanticize that cost. It lets you feel what gets shaved off when you are forced to be legible in the “right” way, harmless in the “right” way, grateful in the “right” way. It also refuses the lie that the mask is the whole person. The literal masks in the piece short-circuit the audience’s desire for easy access, and the physical score keeps showing what happens when the body stops negotiating. When the mask cracks. When breath becomes rhythm. When the deep sea pressure gives way to lift.
Anaïs Duplan’s BLACKSPACE: On The Poetics Of An Afrofuture sits in the constellation like a North Star, defiant in the night. Duplan maps how Black experimental artists use aesthetic strategy as a practice of self-determination, how form itself can be a politics, not an ornament. That frame feels kin to DARKMATTER because Menzo’s work does not treat futurity as a costume you put on over trauma. It treats futurity as method.
Then the constellation catches light with Missy Elliott. “Throw It Back” offers a kind of Black futurism that is maximalist, funny, visually unruly, uninterested in making itself legible to people who only respect Black culture once it has been sanitized and resold. In a work that is explicitly unconcerned with white approval, Missy is a resonant ancestor. Not because the vibes match, but because the posture does.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, there is Drexciya, the Detroit techno duo who, in the 1990s, fused anonymity, underground anti-mainstream aesthetics, and mythological sci-fi storytelling into a deliberate refusal of easy consumption. In the show’s reference constellation, “Drexciya” names an underwater land inhabited by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown into the sea from ships used to transport enslaved people, children who adapt to breathe underwater in their mothers’ wombs. It is a brutal premise that refuses sentimental history and insists, instead, on survival as evolution, and futurity as something Black people do not have to ask permission to imagine.
In that context, “Water Prayers (An Ode To Drexciya),” written by performer Camilo Mejía Cortés, lands less like a citation and more like an invocation. Even on the page, it keeps the ocean in your mouth:
Can you hear the whispers
Telling us their secrets
Treating us like creepers
Keeping us sleepless
Can you hear the explosion
Of voices from the ocean
Songs full of emotions
From a time without a notion
Homeless, Boneless, Careless, Formless,
Homeless, Boneless, Careless, Formless,
Aquatic feedback in my dreams
Submergent streams under the sea
Their radio is a submarine
That plays Sunday at 6:16
Corpse under the sea, corpse under the ocean
Slogans of erosion, slogans in slow-motion
This is where the constellation clicks into a method. The ocean is not only imagery, it is an archive. The stars are not only a metaphor, they are a claim. The work insists that Blackness is continuum, atmosphere, element, not something contained inside a frame that tries to define it.
Then the work does what the best sci-fi does, it hands you the map, and then makes you live inside it.
Ink, Vinyl, Shadow, Starlight
If the references are the navigation, the design is the vessel. It is the pressure chamber, the suit, the sky.
The dressed-for-dystopia costumes by rubber couture designer JustTatty poetically explore DARKMATTER’s themes of containment and escape from the body’s confinement. The liquid sheen of the vinyl mirrors the ink-black substance that gets strewn, embraced, and ultimately found wanting. As the vinyl is doffed, it gives way to various states of nudity, and Menzo’s and Cortés’s bodies themselves become costumes, containers of the soul. Even their athleticism barely contains the oceans and starlight they carry.
Niels Runderkamp’s lighting follows the work’s aquatic themes, not the idealized cerulean blue of the ocean, but the murk and mystery of the deep, and then the stellar depths implied by the show’s title. The lighting reveals, but refuses to let the audience settle into a single way of seeing. It refuses to let looking become extraction. It demands immersion, like dropping your eyes under the surface and realizing the dark is alive.
Morgana Machado Marques’s award-winning scenic design is utility-forward and deceptively simple, and stunning in its symbolic power. Its white elements read as territorial incursion into Black space. Its black elements seep, spread, and reclaim as the show proceeds. The inky black takes back space in ways that feel inevitable, and utterly unconcerned with whether the room approves. The visual world keeps insisting on Blackness as continuum, as atmosphere, as element, as something that cannot be contained inside the white frame that tries to define it.
Time is a Wave
One of the smartest structural moves in DARKMATTER is how it treats time, not as a line you walk forward on, but as a substance that folds, repeats, ruptures, and returns. Past violence is not “behind us,” and the future is not “ahead.” They’re layered, simultaneous, in the room, like waves that keep coming, whether anyone likes it or not.
However, the piece also refuses nihilism. It does not end by asking the audience to witness Black suffering as if that is the moral endpoint. It insists on something more radical, and more exacting: liberation is not a fantasy sequence, it is the only conclusion that makes any sense, the only ending the body will accept, the only timeline worth defending. Deep below, stars above, the arc is emergence.
Review by Ariel Estrada.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on February 17th, 2026. All rights reserved.
