Temporary Boyfriend at Under the Radar Festival 2025
The Chocolate Factory Theater Presents
Malcolm-x Betts and Nile Harris
Temporary Boyfriend
Co-presented with Ping Chong and Company and Under The Radar Festival
January 11-13, 2025
Saturday through Monday at 7pm
@ The NEW Chocolate Factory Theater
38-33 24th Street, Long Island City, NYC 11101
7/N trains to Queensborough Plaza / F to 21st Queensbridge
December 10, 2024 – The Chocolate Factory Theater launches its Spring 2025 season with the premiere of Temporary Boyfriend, a new dance performance by Malcolm-x Betts and Nile Harris. Tickets may be purchased in advance at chocolatefactorytheater.org.
In Temporary Boyfriend, Malcolm-x Betts and Nile Harris stage the nuanced poetics of their long-term collaboration. Longtime performers in one another’s work - including Niggas at Sundown (New York Live Arts) and this house is not a home (Abrons Arts Center), Betts and Harris render the friction and intrigue at the pith of their connection in this improvisatory duet.
Traversing every corner of The Chocolate Factory’s barren architecture, the pair address various touch points of relationality between Black gay men. From the kinship of ancestors lost to the AIDS epidemic, to contemporary manifestations of ephemeral gay brotherhood, Temporary Boyfriend is an intimate portrait of the aesthetics of proximity and estrangement; paying homage to an era of a New York dance and performance scene gone by, along with a generation of Gay men, artists, and mentors lost to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Within a dissonant environment of baby oil bottles, roving lights, rumbling synths, and chopped and screwed 90s R&B tunes, the duo moves from jerky isolations to virtuosic swings and releases, fleetingly citing popular Black social dances and aesthetics. Throughout, as Betts and Harris inhabit their familiar and intimate rapport, the work asks: Is this love for real or is it just a well constructed act? And if this is truth, why do we keep hurting each other?
Created and performed by Malcolm-x Betts and Nile Harris. Sound Design: GENG PTP. Scenic & Technical Direction: Dyer Rhoads.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Malcolm-x Betts is a New York based visual and dance artist who believes that art is a transformative vehicle that brings people and communities together. His artistic work is rooted in investigating embodiment for liberation, Black imagination, and directly engaging with challenges placed on the physical body. He has a community engagement practice allowing artistic freedom and making art accessible to everyone. Performed in works by Snoogybox (Andy Kobilka), Nile Harris, Moriah Evans and Alex Romania. Betts was a 2018 Artist and Resident with Movement Research.
Nile Harris is a performer and director of live works of art. He is an Artistic Leader at Ping Chong and Company and is currently working on commissions with Performance Space New York and The Chocolate Factory Theater. His recent work includes ‘this house is not a home’ (Abrons Arts Center, 2023) with Crackhead Barney & Malcolm-X Betts and ‘minor b’ (The Shed, 2024) with Jim Fletcher.
ABOUT PING CHONG AND COMPANY
PCC is a welcoming home and site of experimentation for multigenerational artists. The company creates original interdisciplinary, community-specific work; and cultivates artistry through training and education programs.
Originally, founded in New York City in 1975 by legendary theatrical innovator, Ping Chong, the company is now being transformed through a three-year transition period led by an Artistic Leadership Team comprised of Nile Harris, Jane Jung, Mei Ann Teo, Talvin Wilks, and Sara Zatz. Tasked with creating a forward moving model for PCC building on its 50 year legacy, this collective is centering consensus based, non-hierarchical leadership structures, while creating exciting dynamic works of art that meet the moment and speak to our times.
ABOUT UNDER THE RADAR
UNDER THE RADAR is New York City’s premier annual festival of experimental theater, featuring cutting-edge performances from around the world and across the U.S. The 20th edition of UTR will run from January 4-19, 2025 presenting over a dozen productions at various partner organizations across the city.
UNDER THE RADAR connects with the city, the nation, and the world through the voices of innovative multidisciplinary artists. The festival champions transparency, equity, and collaboration in creating new live works. It embodies global citizenship, fosters innovation, and provides a stage for new voices.
ABOUT THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY THEATER
The Chocolate Factory Theater is an artist-centered organization, built by and for artists. Co-founders Sheila Lewandowski and Brian Rogers began making work together in 1995 and quickly saw the need for a creative home to support their work and the work of fellow experimental performance-based artists. The Chocolate Factory therefore has grown and developed within and through a creative process that centers the development of new work, as guided by makers.
The Chocolate Factory Theater exists to encourage and support performing artists in their process of inquiry. We engage with a community of artists who challenge themselves and, in doing so, challenge us. We believe that by supporting the labor of artists and the public presentation of their work, we contribute to elevating New York City as a thriving and more equitable wellspring of ideas.
The Chocolate Factory embraces artistic practice as an integral part of the artist’s whole life, an essential component of the life of our community and a key element of a larger national and international artistic dialogue. As such, we host artists as our equal partners with shared autonomy, trust and appreciation.
Since its founding in 2004, The Chocolate Factory Theater has supported the development and presentation of new work by a community of local, national and international artists working in dance, theater, performance, and related practices.
The Chocolate Factory Theater continues its pioneering commitment to addressing labor conditions within the independent performing arts community by paying all lead artists, performers, designers and technicians a fair hourly wage, on the books, for all rehearsal and production hours within our spaces.
An extensive archive of The Chocolate Factory’s past performances is freely available at vimeo.com/chocolatefactory.
