651 ARTS, Brooklyn’s premier institution for the African Diasporic performing arts, will present the world premiere of its major Season presentation with André M. Zachery’s Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends. The show will mark the first performance at 10 Lafyette, 651’s new home in Downtown Brooklyn.

Conceived by Renegade Performance Group’s Artistic Director and renowned choreographer André M. Zachery, Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends is a solo performance that uses movement to explore the self-examination of Black masculinity through history, memory, text, poetry and geography. It is a personal narrative that begins with Zachery’s youth in 1980-90’s Chicago and intersects with three legendary figures: Fred Hampton, Ben (Benji) Wilson and Harold Washington. Guided in part by the oracular voice of Chicago ancestor laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, the performer grapples with the legacy of these three men — a revolutionary, an athletic phenomenon and a post-Civil Rights era politician, all viewed in their primes as messiahs. The work unpacks how the expectations and pressures cast by their lives, deaths and pursuant mythologies shaped Black men who came of age in the city they left behind.

Co-written by producing director Ayinde Jean-Baptiste, the work features original compositions by Chicago Poet Laureate avery r. young, and improvisations & textures by sound artist Sadah Espii Proctor.