Dancer Nekia Zulu navigates New York Metropolis streets en path to carry out at Meeting (picture Keenan Newman)
I’ve been following his work since round 2006. The primary piece I noticed was only a picture of him smiling. That alone felt like a radical act: a homosexual Black man from Louisiana, joyful, current, not performing trauma. Meeting seems like an extension of that. Pleasure isn’t distinction, however moderately the purpose.
Visually, the movie is beautiful. Cinematographer Johnny Symons is aware of when to lean in and when to drag again. Even the extra candid moments really feel intentional, as if everybody concerned is aware of that is extra than simply documentation. It’s a form of communion.
Then there’s the AI character — half CITA’s World, (the late 90s/early 2000s BET present that includes a digital Black host), half Deep House 9, half digital griot. It seems as punctuation, not plot. I didn’t at all times join with it emotionally, however it helped make clear one thing: Meeting isn’t nearly capturing a piece. It’s the work. The AI reminds us we’re some other place totally — someplace speculative, ritualistic, alive.
There’s a scene that lingers. Throughout a decolonization workshop, the place viewers members may interact immediately with the AI, a masked participant approaches the mic and questions the mission. It was through the COVID-19 pandemic, so sporting a masks isn’t uncommon. However the tone? That was acquainted. Sharp. Entitled. She begins by thanking the viewers and invoking critiques of “capitalist white supremacist patriarchy” — a phrase drawn immediately from bell hooks, significantly in Ain’t I a Girl — however shortly pivots to denouncing the AI itself. “All of the knowledge it has comes from people,” she says. “We can share these things with each other … in spaces that aren’t influenced by technology.” Then, bluntly: “Fuck this AI.” The supply felt much less like engagement and extra like a takedown.
Contained in the Meeting exhibition at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory, holograms and video-mapped partitions pulsate with dancers and diasporic fractals impressed by the geometry inside conventional African tradition (picture Keenan Newman)
Rashaad Newsome creates the AI named “Being” at his studio (picture Keenan Newman)
And nonetheless, the movie doesn’t attempt to clarify itself. It’s not excited about catering to viewers who anticipate to be taught. In case you’re exterior the neighborhood it’s talking to, the burden is on you to hear. That doesn’t imply the movie is inaccessible. It leaves the door open — however as an alternative of flattening its topics to take action, it lets them keep entire, tender, sharp, sophisticated. That form of generosity is uncommon, and it’s a part of what makes Meeting hit so exhausting.
I’ll be sincere: I wasn’t positive how I felt at first. The primary half of the movie entails its heaviest use of know-how, and I frightened it would get caught there. Nevertheless it doesn’t. It blooms. Slowly. It’s like a Southern dish: it’s good the primary day, however even higher after it’s had time to take a seat. I cried — greater than as soon as. As a result of what we’re witnessing isn’t simply efficiency — it’s presence. And never only one form of Blackness, one kind of queerness, one form of futurity. It’s an entire spectrum, making room for itself.
There’s a quote from Erica Alexander that saved echoing in my head whereas I watched: “The past is painful, the present is precarious, but the future is free.” That’s exactly what this movie holds. And never in some naïve, techno-utopian sense. The liberty right here is earned. It’s grounded in code, choreography, and care. It reminds us that Blackness and know-how have at all times been entangled — and that the longer term isn’t one thing we’re ready for. It’s already being constructed.
After I discuss Paris Is Burning, I at all times have so as to add a footnote — clarify its limits, its legacy, what it received incorrect. Meeting doesn’t want that. It’s what occurs when care, authorship, and imaginative and prescient are aligned.
It doesn’t simply think about a greater future. It makes one.
Meeting will display on the Maine Worldwide Movie Pageant in Waterville, Maine, on July 17, 2025, at 6:40pm, and in different areas worldwide. For the most recent screening dates, go to the movie’s web site.
