Watch the Premiere of Miles Greenberg's "Alphaville Noir"

Alphaville Noir, loosely based on, and titled after Godard’s 1965 sci-fi film noir, was a cycle of immersive performance studies in the shape of a four-act opera. I wrote and performed these acts in March of last year alongside an all-Black cast of twenty-five performers while in residence at Palais de Tokyo, in Paris. This film is an artifact of what was originally ten channels of visuals projected in the space to accompany the live experience. The channels would cycle based on preset algorithms that would influence the live choreography in turn.

The series was a congregation apparatus for my collaborators and I. We were performers and non-performers who came together in the basement of a museum to conduct weekly experiments with one another in this amniotic, liminal space of creation. The creations were intrinsic to us, to our bodies, and to our Lives. The gaze was erased.

Each performer had agency to communicate and each audience member had agency to consume the work on their own terms, all the while centralizing the Black, queer body in space. Nothing is linear, everything is fluid—Alphaville Noir signifies a Black utopia. It is an ongoing work to this day.

Black artists are being asked to answer very big, very probing and very labour-intensive questions about our bodies and space. I think that the answers to a lot of those questions are already embedded in the work. In fact, the answers have always been embedded in the work. So, as opposed to picking apart the who, the what and the why of racism as a suddenly hypervisible young artist in the ongoing Theatre of Black Death, I feel compelled to take every opportunity I have to contribute to our culture now, as it Lives and breathes, in any way that I can. This film is part of my answer.