Temporary Boyfriend at Under the Radar Festival 2025

Temporary Boyfriend, a new dance performance by Malcolm-x Betts and PCC Artistic Leader Nile Harris will premiere at the Chocolate Factory Theater (located at 38-33 24th Street, Long Island City, NYC 11101) from January 11 - 13, 2025 as part of the Under the Radar Festival. Tickets may be purchased 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?