On September 20 & 21, 2025 Kayla Farrish shared two new works, A Beast and DOCILE, at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park’s Black Box Theatre, Studio Complex in Tivoli, New York, as part of Kaatsbaan’s Annual Festival 2025. Both works brought conversations with the self and the other to the fore while centralizing the fertile venture of inquiry and decentralizing the process of arriving at an answer. In preparation for the show, and in line with the theme of conversations, Farrish and I engaged in a shapeshifting and poetic text message exchange:
Kayla Farrish: “Hi, Darvejon!
Darvejon A. Jones: “I’m excited to see what you’ve been working on!”
KF: “I’m so excited for you to see these new ideas. They’re intimate and wild in a different way.
And I’ve been trying to deepen into that expanse and release, if possible.”
The Other
A Beast is a work that shares a private conversation between two Black individuals, one perceived as a woman and the other as a man. Their duet presents the shared and varied contemplations on existence and identity in a world that is still reconciling with its fraught relationship with Black bodies.
DAJ: “Wow! That sounds like a rupture of sorts…I’m in that space too…”
KF: “‘Rupture’ is so resonant- that feels present. Mmm, I’m excited to talk more.
Wow- I want to hear what you’re cultivating/researching/being held by…”
DAJ: “…I think it’s madness. This world is a devastating place. And still the wildflowers seem to bloom in the spring. The cicadas yell wildly at us. And the rain falls…That has to be a kind of madness…A kind of insanity: Repeating the same actions, knowing nothing will change…Nihilism? Afropessimism? Death? I don’t know.”
One of these bodies is the perceived Black female body, as a site of strength able to withstand not only the forced subjugation of patriarchy, but also the terrorism of white supremacy, and the global source from which beauty aesthetics are siphoned. And another one of these bodies is the perceived Black male body as “the center of difference and site of contestation.” (Dixon Gottschild 84) This work mobilizes these truths in staggering opposition, forcing the viewer to draw a connection between the two experiences, bodies, and embodied knowledges, while inviting them to contemplate who they sit opposite of. What emerges from this work is a deeper understanding of the possible relationship structure between Black women and men, as well as their shared fight for liberation. This tension is exemplified through Farrish and Blowe’s athletic dancing.
KF: “How to go mad without losing your mind…”Toni Cade Bambara, too – the artist’s role is to load the gun/the revolution is free fallAnd so is this world and the collapse…human-created -destruction
Mmm…
Nature.”
But also to accept the expanse- the truth
The wild
The fall from indoctrination
The untethering
What is that journey of feeling?
DAJ: “Too much. Something has to snap.
Omg. I may include this convo in the write-up. This is prose in practice. It’s like we’re playing chess.”
KF: “Mmm, and it does
I feel those ruptures
I feel our magic
Years and years and us
And also odes and protections to people of now
There’s so much”
It feels honestly like opening – even though I don’t know what I’m trying to say yet. But I really love this!
DAJ: “A way out.”
With attuned mastery, Farrish and Blowe physicalize these conversations mentioned above and bring them to life through their moving bodies. “Full Out” Farrish moves through space with the prowess of a panther, and Blowe, in his fascination with disrupting body hierarchies, captivates with his fluent multilingual dancing. The convergence of these two players is where the conversation exists in this performance.
The Self
In Docile, Farrish showcases an important and increasingly private conversation with the self. For my non-Black readers, there comes a moment when a Black person must claim their Blackness for themselves. Along this journey, a decision about which cultural integers make sense for them comes into view; this is because Black Culture is not monolithic. Furthermore, historically, “Black” has been a branding wherein all ethnic and cultural differences have been wiped away to serve the initiatives of Western Europe to force people of the African continent into perpetual servitude. Before the invasion of the African continent, the indigenous people did not refer to themselves as “Black” or “Negro”; rather, they identified with their ethnic and cultural heritages, which were often reflected in the languages they spoke. With this complex history of Blackness as the seed of its creation (by whiteness), the intentional choice to claim Black today, especially in this moment, is a claim to solidarity with all people of the African Diaspora.
KF: “Mmm”
DAJ: “That’s where I am…Like, how do we get to the next timeline?!”
In the work, the darkness of the stage is like an overwhelming void that the viewer desperately tries to make sense of. Farrish attacks this work with acuity, using light to investigate darkness— knowing through the opposite corollary. We were given some help from Kayla’s voice heard through song and poetry. Her dancing, as usual, was incredible; when we were able to clearly take in her limitless movement underneath the cloud of smoke pumped into the space, we were held by her generous movement language. Combined with the darkness and smoke, Farrish appeared to be floating inside a nebula of thoughts.
At the end of the show, I felt a sense of release, as if Farrish had struck some old cord in my spirit. I shared with her how generous she is for performing these intimate Black conversations of the self and the other. It is not lost on me the toll on the spirit that the Black artist agrees to when they choose to contribute to an archive that, despite all the work Black artists have done, is somehow still lacking in the crucial evidence that would substantiate an America that respects and protects our existence.
KF: “Yesss!!
I mean also I want a new universe where we can be. Maybe be in our magic and in the magic of this world/nature/earth
Where we can heal
And where we can beee”
DAJ: “Lovely.”
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