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How can Harriss ceremonial tribute to these lives keep pace?
While the company is inside BAM delivering a eulogy, bodies pile up at the doors.
For most of the piece, the audience stays together, shifting from foyer to talking circle to seats.
Let me be clear: This ritual is first and foremost for Black people.
We are glad non-Black people are here.
We welcome you, but this piece was created and is expressed with Black folks in mind.
If you are prepared to honor that through your respectful, conscientious presence, you are welcome to stay.
After this process, a song takes us into the scripted section.
The audience sings too.
(The mouth chatters away in her pocket, saying something about my neck.)
Eventually, these complaints about interpersonal aggression build into raw grief.
When I sawWhat to Send Upin 2018, I called it achoreopoemstretched over a drumhead.
The plays crisp splendor had grown in my memory until it had overwhelmed the other components of the evening.
But this time, I saw that Harriss finest work is not confined to the choreopoetic section.
Much ofWhat to Send Upis there to make the mechanisms of artistic engagement obvious.
Look at how you intersect with this, this piece says.
Look at yourself watching.
Since the earlier production, some of the shows physics have altered slightly but importantly.
While the text itself seems the same as it was in 2018, the watchers have changed.
Does that steal a little of the shows power?
Only in a way.
It does file down one edge, but it sharpens another.
The show does not need to shock you to affect you.
Instead, it now seems that the repetition with its shift from surprise to unsurprise is the point.
(Rituals recur because the devil never stops.)
But whats awful is how confident everyone is about programming it for the autumn.
Certainly no one worries about its relevance.
Everyone knows it will have gone down again.
What to Send Up When It Goes Downis at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through July 11.
