Questionnaire For Legacy

1. LEGACY is a New York-based collective of Black queer artists working across a pretty spectacular range of media — music, dance, film, performance, comedy, poetry. Can you talk a little about how you all met and how you decided to work together? 

AREWÀ BASIT: The founding members of LEGACY met through the serendipitous cosmic pull of the NYC art, theater, and nightlife scenes. Our acute awareness of each other and our respective disciplines and practices grew as we did, and inevitably, we began collaborating on works together. In 2019, our founding members, Kyle and Garrett, collaborated on BLK MLK, a live performance piece which explored and challenged themes related to the Black queer male body and Black masculinity, inspired by Tongues Untied. I was one of the featured artists. Each of us gravitated to each other through mutual respect and artistic interest, which inevitably led to the development of our collaborations. In 2020, in the aftermath of the public lynching of George Floyd, we found it imperative that we collectivize with the intention of seeing our dreams realized with the support of our peers, and we set up a crowdfunding effort to start the collective and launch our first project. We chose to form an LLC to establish equity and carve out a resource built for and by the community. We hope to make our dream of a world where we can create out of abundance, and not out of scarcity, a reality. 

2. Why did you all feel that a production collective specifically would change the landscape for Black queer artists working in New York? What considerations do you bring to producing each other’s work and the work of the artists you collaborate with? 

GARRETT ALLEN: It is integral that our stories, experiences, and artistry be told for us, by us. Extraction, exploitation, and undervaluing have long been rampant in all artistic disciplines, and we found a deep need for space for Black queer and trans artists to be able to produce and share without the limitations that are created in a white supremacist and capitalistic system. Our first project, a music video for Arewà Basit’s debut single “Fluid,” was made with an entirely Black queer team. After wrapping this project, we received an immense amount of feedback that this intentionality of space and process was not only fulfilling artistically but also healing. Our hope is that we can not only support artists in realizing their visions but also highlight ways of making that are ethical and equitable and spread beyond our collective. Many relationships and collaborations that we have spawned have continued beyond us, which impacts the wider landscape of Black queer artists. Our consideration for each part of production is deeply rooted in maintaining the integrity of our collaborators’ dreams. Though we may not be able to meet every part of this dream, that space to live in the expansiveness and possibility allows for us to offer support in the ways each individual project needs. As we continue to build our infrastructure and network, we are creating our own urgently necessary avenue to battle these systems and structures that aim to silence us. In this fight, we aim to use this infrastructure that we have built as artists in community to answer the need to diversify the industries in which we all desire to work. Yes, we want to fill a void in mainstream production, but above all, we want our community to be seen and heard on its own terms. 

3. One thing that strikes me going through the videos from last spring’s The Black Beginning is the breadth of sheer formal experimentation that LEGACY supports: you featured Junior Mintt taking the audience to drag church, Nile Harris’s existential gingerbread man, Paris Alexander doing comedy in a club kid’s blowup suit. What aesthetics and styles are you all drawn to, and what do you hope people take away from the collaborations you work on? 

LEGACY: Each of us approaches questions of style and aesthetic differently in our individual work, which is part of what makes working together so exciting and unpredictable. From LEGACY’s early days onward, one thing we’ve consistently agreed on is a commitment to supporting Afrofuturistic art, especially work that expands on what exactly that can look like; work that is formalistically forward, typically non-traditional, non-linear, and centered on world- building/atmosphere, though we aren’t opposed to more standard storytelling or meaning- making structures. We aim to embrace Black queer expression in all of its multitudes, so the projects we take on cover an array of forms that is as vast as our experiences and voices. Serious and unserious, joyful and visceral, cerebral and intuitive: we want it all. Hopefully, any artist we collaborate with will come away with an expanded sense of their capacity to create within a distinctly Black queer dreamscape, as well as a sense of assuredness that their work deserves all of the support we can offer plus support that goes beyond our bandwidth. In an ideal world, it shouldn’t ever be usual for Black queer and trans artists to feel as though our artistic ambitions might only be possible with the help of pockets that may or may not best serve us, and these collaborations are our way of striving for that ideal. As for spectators, we hope that the quality and character of our work speaks for itself and exemplifies what can happen when artists from our communities come together. On a technical level, there’s an emphasis we naturally place on multi- and cross-disciplinarity; it’s definitely a goal to leave audiences with a greater sense of connectedness between seemingly disparate forms of artmaking, like poetry and movement or drag and installation — or any other combination, really. 

4. Arewa, Garrett, and Kyle, you all showed work in The Black Beginning as well as helping to produce it. What feels different to you about working together as LEGACY from working on your own art practices?

GA: Producing with LEGACY has deeply informed my individual art practice and vice versa. Though there is definitely a difference between being in the producing chair vs. being in the lead artist chair, I believe I have been able to learn how to support myself and others in oscillating between the two. My work with LEGACY has strengthened my artistic voice and deepened my connection to why I do what I do, especially as it relates to radical empathy, collective liberation, and building a better, brighter (and Blacker and queerer) future. Being supported by my peers and community in making my piece for The Black Beginning was unlike anything I have experienced before. And feeling that fulfillment, healing, support, and integrity of my vision has made it so I never, ever want to have to compromise myself to fit something that has no intention of serving me.

AB: The difference between my personal art practice and our work as producers and co-founders of LEGACY is rooted in determining the intention of the artists whose ideas and visions are being uplifted and supported, while honoring the integrity and sincerity of the work created. When we shot the “Fluid” music video, I remember feeling so held throughout the experience, especially as we were working with music that is so personal to me. The vulnerability of creating the music is mirrored in the production process, but I draw a certain strength from the teamwork of having a collective goal.

KYLE CARRERO LOPEZ: My solo practice is grounded in writing, which is usually a solo act (not counting the many conversations a writer has in their head with the work of the authors who influence them). LEGACY pushes me not to be solipsistic, since it’s based in group work! Though the producer hat makes up most of what we do together, working with LEGACY on our live performance projects–like Womb! There It Is, which we developed as part of our 2022 Ars Nova Vision Residency, and performed excerpts of as part of BOFFO’s Sunday Sounds programming on Fire Island–also gives me chances to work in ways that I don’t usually, like in backup singing or dance, which are necessary forms of support for highlighting the rest of LEGACY’s skill sets. It’s a lot of fun, reminds me not to limit myself in what kind of artist I can be, and inspires me not to have a one-track mind in how I approach my writing. 

5. Can you talk a little about the relationship LEGACY has to nightlife? I’m thinking here of how your fundraiser this past spring — which I’m sorry to have missed! — was at H0L0, a club in Bushwick recently raided by the NYPD, and I’m also thinking about how it feels like nightlife, partying, dance music is so much more thickly present in queer and trans culture in NYC right now than before the pandemic.

LEGACY: All three of us have been involved with New York nightlife for some time. It has been very fascinating to see how it has evolved and changed while remaining an important haven for our community. And this is far from new. From ballroom and voguing, to house and techno music scenes, to chosen club family, we have seen how important nightlife has been to Black queer people over time. And we have also seen how frequently our spaces have been co-opted by white, cis, het folks chasing what is “cool” or “in.” However, communing through dance parties is not something that is just cool or fun; it’s also a way of learning, growing, and building new modes of being. We care for one another in ways that we aren’t cared for in the outside world. We create spaces that are safe for us to express ourselves in ways that make us feel most whole. And we celebrate living, being, and existing in the moment together. Being in lockdown, unable to commune in these ways, put into perspective how crucial these intentional spaces are for our community. Our hope for our latest event was both to fundraise to be able to keep building LEGACY and supporting artists as well as celebrate our existence and resistance to the forces of white supremacy, bigotry, and capitalism. The murder of O'Shae Sibley, killed for voguing outside a gas station in Brooklyn this past July, reiterated the fact that our joy, expression, and simple living is seen as a threat to a lot of society. We honor him and the countless Black queer and trans folks who have been unjustly taken from us because of hate. Nightlife, at its best, provides an opportunity to effectively counter daytime power dynamics. Most clubs don’t want to be flooded with straight men, the demographic which controls the overwhelming majority of capital, industry, and cultural power worldwide; in Brooklyn, it’s not uncommon for trans femmes, especially Black trans femmes, to be granted free admission and other perks at many parties, which is one way to offset the social transmisogyny and discrimination in fundamental needs like employment and housing that they face in day-to-day life. In the same way that LEGACY seeks to upend established norms that hinder artists in our communities, the best parts of nightlife work toward enacting more equitable worlds and outcomes than the ones we have now.

6. This issue of the Movement Research Performance Journal is, in a sense, supposed to reflect on and update the “gender” issue that the PJ published in 1993. That issue is very of its moment. Based on things you’ve read and watched and conversations you’ve had, what do you think is different about queer performance and artmaking in New York now as compared to 10, 15, or 30 years ago? 

KCL: It’s fascinating to read through the “gender” issue and see how the conversations happening on gender right now are so different in some ways and exactly the same in others; for example, Chris Martin’s conversations with two trans interviewees, Danny and Vern, points out so much political division between cisgender and transgender segments of the LGBTQ community. While solidarity between queer people of cis and trans identities seems comparatively higher than 30 years ago, it’s impossible to ignore that we’re currently moving through a spike of reactionary ideology among some LGB people who co-sign politicians’ claims that trans people are a danger to sports and public restrooms and whatever else they feel is a cultural battleground, and that allowing gender-affirming care for youths who identify themselves as trans is tantamount to child abuse. The terminology we use and the ways we interact with one another have changed, but it remains to be seen whether LGB people will ever fully step away from the transphobia we’ve all been socialized into and toward a practice of actual queer togetherness. Jill Johnston’s piece in the issue on dance artists notes a reviewer’s casual homophobia in response to a dance performance on marriage by Jim Self, and one way I think queer performance and artmaking is different these days is that it’s a bit harder for that kind of criticism to get a green light since there are more of us–queer and trans people–on editorial mastheads and scoring big bylines than there ever used to be. I think of how a critic once described Bill T. Jones’s multidisciplinary dance piece Still/Here (1994) as “victim art” because of its focus on people living with HIV/AIDS; she refused to even go and watch it for herself. We’re able to better advocate for the work of queer and trans artists through traditional channels and through social media, that great equalizer which has simultaneously platformed no shortage of fascist content, and yet has also fostered greater ease of access to archival footage and other materials, which has been paramount to LEGACY’s practice of research and remembrance of what’s come before us — and how many brilliant artists have been lost to HIV/AIDS, anti-Blackness, and homo/transphobia — that has allowed us to do what we do now. Artists like Tiona Nekkia McClodden are engaging in similar practices that trace and honor Black queer lineages, and that sense of reaching for severed connections feels key to a lot of contemporary queer artmaking.