Shamel Pitts

About Shamel's Work

Shamel Pitts is a choreographer and dancer developing multidisciplinary, performance-based works centered on collaboration and imagining new ways of being in the world. Pitts is the founder and artistic director of TRIBE, a group of artists working in a wide range of media, including lighting design, video-mapping projection technologies, electronic music composition, cinematography, and video art. TRIBE’s works emerge from the collective artistic vision of its members. Pitts brings his unique choreographic style to bear on the groups’ commitment to envisioning a future free from the constraints of historical oppression, particularly for the African diaspora.

Pitts’s choreography is rooted in classical dance forms and Gaga—a movement language focused on dancers’ responses to their own bodily sensations—and integrates influences from contemporary dance, hip-hop, and nightlife/club culture. TRIBE’s unique way of working is akin to worldbuilding, where spatial, lighting, and sound design elements are fully integrated with the dancers’ movements into multisensory works that envelop audiences. BLACK HOLE: Trilogy and Triathlon (2022), the last of three works in Pitts’s “BLACK Series,” features three performers accompanied by original soundscapes and visual projections. In TRIBE’s hands, a black hole is not destructive but rather a source of generative energy, and the work explores the Black body coming into being through collective empowerment. Near the end of the work, the three performers are engulfed in darkness as a pulsating beat wanes. Then, in a burst of light, the trio reappears and the beat returns, growing stronger and louder in a powerful expression of reawakening. 

While Pitts explores external perceptions of Blackness in his “BLACK Series,” the works in his “RED Series” turn inward and focus on the diversity of experiences and relationships possible within Black identity. In Touch of RED (2022), a duet for two male dancers, Pitts explores how men relate to each other and to the world. For this work, the artists of TRIBE and their collaborators ingeniously transform the theater into a boxing ring and then into a dance club. Themes of physicality, masculinity, intimacy, and vulnerability unfold through Pitts’s choreography, as the work explores possibilities for masculine power and softness beyond the bounds of societal norms. Through his vision of cooperative creation, Pitts is creating new models for promoting self-discovery and freedom through art.