CAP UCLA's 2023 Spring Programs Kick Off With Shamel Pitts

UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) welcomes dancer-choreographer Shamel Pitts and the multidisciplinary artist collective TRIBE presenting their latest work Touch of RED on Friday, March 3 and Saturday, March 4 at 8 pm in the Freud Playhouse. Tickets are $38 and are available now at cap.ucla.edu, 310-825-2101 and the UCLA Central Ticket Office.

2020 Guggenheim Fellow, performance artist, choreographer, dancer and spoken word artist Shamel Pitts brings to the stage Touch of RED, a new evening-length performance work that consists of a duet for two men inside of a contemporary ring. The work investigates how Black men can allow themselves to soften, even under extreme pressure and heat. The confined space references a futuristic and voyeuristic gladiator entertainment site in which a heat path between the two performers builds, not out of aggression or combat, but within an enhanced electrifying effeminacy that heals.

Touch of RED is the newest work in Pitts' "RED Series," which explores the colorfulness within Blackness. As artistic director and founder of TRIBE, the Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary arts collective, Pitts is dedicated to creating a body of work that supports, shelters and cultivates an Afro-futuristic performance art landscape in which the multitude of Black diversity and capacity is realized, allowed, nurtured and shared within our complex humanity.