PRESS

mayfield brooks explores grief and decomposition in the hull of a 19th-century cargo ship.

With the Help of Whales, a Choreographer Falls Into an Abyss

By Gia Kourlas Photographs and Video by Simbarashe Cha, June 20, 2024

“Striving Towards Utopia”: Inside the BOFFO Performance Festival

By Michael Bullock for Interview Magazine, August 18, 2023

mayfield brooks, *Sensoria: An Opera Strange*, June 2022, Danspace Project. Photo: Ian Douglas/courtesy Danspace Project.

ARTFORUM TOP TEN by Lynne Cooke, December 2022

mayfield brooks, Sensoria: An Opera Strange (Danspace Project, New York)

Its stained-glass windows aflame with the light of the setting sun, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery became an eloquent agent in brooks’s unforgettable opera. In tones oscillating between a whisper and a wail, the artist gave voice to pain, grief, and mourning in an immersive fusion of revolutionary songs, laments, watery reverberations, and whale calls. The charged soundscape, amplified by video projection, aligned Black life with the endangered mammal: As the dead creature falls to the seafloor, the ocean waters and marine populace are nourished by its disintegrating carcass.

Best Dance Performances of 2022

By Gia Kourlas for The New York Times, Dec. 2, 2022

mayfield brooks

As part of Danspace Project’s spring Platform 2022, “The Dream of the Audience (Part II),” the choreographer presented a dreamy, mystical look at grief — inspired, in part, by the death of a friend and dance partner — that was also related to Brooks’s research into whales. In “Sensoria: An Opera Strange,” there was vocalizing, dancing and even a ghostly duet. (Read our feature about Brooks’s “Whalefall.”)