At the door upstage right, Symara Sarai bursts in, shoved by an unseen force. She appears off-balance, jostled among an invisible crowd. Sarai’s The LOVE Piece is a solo in name only, throwing us into a room alive with selves aching to be seen.
Sarai careens around the cavernous architecture of St. Mark’s Church. Their physical virtuosity is immediately clear. Creaturely and restless, they high-kick, squat, roll, bump into walls, slide down stairs, and shake their ankles, adorned with red frills and bells that threaten to slide off at any moment. Sarai repeatedly attempts to find their footing, stomping emphatically and bracing against pillars. She yells woah wow woooaaah, as if searching for the right words to placate the inaudible voices vying for her attention. This room is crowded with loves. They won’t be satisfied by a single language of addressivity.
I have followed Sarai’s work since 2022, when I saw “Symara and her Lasso,” which won a 2023 Bessie Award. Sarai constructs interdisciplinary, physically daring choreographies that meld critical theory with black queer femme personal archive, citing Saidiya Hartman‘s critical fabulation method as foundational to their inquiries.
In its early moments, The LOVE Piece brings to mind Hartman’s 2008 essay, Venus in Two Acts, in which Hartman emphasizes the power of fiction and fantasy to reanimate marginalized histories with agency: “By flattening the levels of narrative discourse and confusing narrator and speakers, I hope to…engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices.” Sarai embraces this multiplicity in her exploration of love. Through their gradually steadying movement, Sarai contends with a storm of people who surround her with their own narratives of what it means to love.
For Sarai, this confrontation with authentic love also requires a continual, uncomfortable look in the mirror. She demonstrates this literally, dragging in three large mirrors close to the audience and rearranging them in various configurations. Sarai props the objects up, leans them against one another, and allows the audience to view our own faces. These mirrors, and what they capture, become characters themselves: enlivened representations of Sarai’s own love interests. Transfiguring into romantic beings, from needy lovers to unrequited crushes, Sarai engages with them verbally as well as physically, passionately making out with the mirrors, firmly demanding they prove their love to her, hugging them, hiding underneath them, and resting on them for support. Meanwhile, we watch, hearing Sarai’s words and watching her expressions. The mirrors begin to show visible traces of love’s physical labor: Sarai’s tongue marks, spit, and finger prints remain in clear view, illuminated by increasingly reddening party lights.
A stagehand wheels in a disco ball. We see the mirrored self, fragmented into spinning form. All the selves are partying together. A beam of light strikes the disco ball as a house track plays. Sarai has disappeared, traveling to the upper balconies, shouting vulnerable questions about her own self-described obsession with love. Sarai speaks to us directly. The fourth wall of this house is thinning.
Sarai reappears on the now-thoroughly-fogged stage. Backlit, she sways in front of a fan, clad in a slinky dress. We watch her deliciously succumb to fantasy one more time, but it soon breaks. Suddenly, large cracks of light appear on the ceiling, walls, and floor. The sound score abruptly shifts to crashing debris and clattering objects. The building—and the idealistic, uncomplicated fantasy of love inside—crumbles. Driven offstage, Sarai screams: raw, excruciating, and loud.
Hartman’s method of critical fabulation seeks to redress violent omissions in archives. Omissions that stem from a racist vantage that deems certain narratives of greater importance than others. Through their own retelling in The LOVE Piece, Sarai highlights the exclusion of love stories, like hers, from the Western performance canon. As Sarai “re-presents” her own romantic history through fantasy, fiction, and a chorus of divergent voices, she physicalizes Hartman’s method through the Black, queer femme body, challenging the power of a popularized, singular heteronormative love as a stable organizing system of human relationship. In their resistance to this narrative, Sarai finds spaciousness and possibility for a queerly evolving conception of love, rooted in whole-bodied experimentation, play, and investment. To love, Sarai seems to argue, requires rebuilding oneself over and over, incorporating all the mismatched fragments of self into the walls of a new house.
Returning again to the stage, still cracked and flooded with red light, Sarai wheels herself in on a cart full of plush fabric. She appears fatigued, horny, and fed up. She drops all performative veils, assuming the stance of an open mic storyteller. She shares anecdote after anecdote, walking the audience through the history of her romantic life. Beginning at age three, she makes it to her teen years before wondering, wryly, aloud whether any of this even matters for us, the viewers. She confronts us for our lack of emotional response. This better be the dress rehearsal, she deadpans. With nothing left to hide, Sarai tells us what to expect for the big finish: a tender song and dance rendition of Adele’s “Lovesong.” Nothing more. Nothing less.
There’s an uncanniness to catching a celebrity on the train or seeing your teacher at the grocery store. Sarai’s Adele finale cinches The LOVE Piece with a similar wash of the familiar-made-strange. Without the R&B star bravado, smoke machine, or stage full of mirrors we’ve seen her employ, Sarai gets to the unguarded punchline: Whenever I’m alone with you. You make me feel like I am home again, she sings. She tells us.
By these final moments, I find myself reflecting on my personal experiences of love—how I’ve come to appreciate my relational points of friction and frustration as vital to those relationships’ growth. If love takes place in the house of my body, as Sarai posits in The LOVE Piece, I must allow my very rooms to shift, break, and expand with frustration, heartbreak, and risk of misunderstanding, to accommodate a more expansive, unwieldy authentic love.
Sarai drifts offstage and disappears behind the audience, inviting the audience to sit within a newfound spaciousness, making room for love—whatever its shape may be—to fill the church behind them.
Photo of Symara Sarai by Rachel Keane.
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