Established in 2014, the Yard theatre’s Now festival is a fringe showcase of new and experimental performance, this year opening with a new work from Marikiscrycrycry (the artist moniker of Malik Nashad Sharpe). Goner is a solo show that keeps reminding us – sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly – that Sharpe is in fact never alone: there’s always us, the audience, looking and waiting and wanting.
Throughout the long opening section, Sharpe faces determinedly away from us, presenting a bare back, pink-orange chap trousers highlighting dancehall hips, an embroidered plait reaching from neck to knees so that it dangles between their pulsating buttocks like a macramé tail. The scene is as highly sexualised as it is de-eroticised: no sense of pleasure or person, just the moves, just the parts.
