Marikiscrycrycry , Hang Time

Hang Time is a choreographic meditation on hanging out and hanging on. Hanging in the air. Hanging in there. Hanging by a thread. Braids hanging low off the nape of the neck. Bodies suspended in time. Lives hanging from one another. Moving between soca and bouyon, séance, ritual, and gathering, the work creates a charged world where dance, music, and haunting collide.
Drawing from Black and Caribbean histories and lived experience, Marikiscrycrycry explores grief, mental health, and the fracture lines within masculine communities. Cornrows and braids emerge as protection, coding, and trace – lines that guide, connect, or suddenly become a rope. Hang Time moves within the tension between care and danger, survival and loss of control. The performers carry one another, lose one another, and endure.

Emerging from a two-year artistic process, Hang Time explores what happens to a community when it is confronted with extraordinary loss. Eight performers move through states of exhaustion, collapse, invocation, and reverberation. Contemporary and Caribbean dance practices come together in a large-scale, athletic, and maximalist movement language. Jumps, social dances, moments of virtuosity, and physical exhaustion meet as bodies support and carry one another.
Hang Time is full of contradictions: dark and playful, intense and full of joy, virtuosic and exhausted. A spiritual soundscape featuring Caribbean instruments such as calypso, steel pans, and tabla drums meets personal pop tracks that spark memories. Stylised images play with gravity and moments of suspension. Hanging becomes a social, historical, choreographic, and metaphysical condition.
The title Hang Time gathers multiple meanings: hanging out, hanging in the air, hanging on, hanging by a thread. It also speaks to diaspora, and to the ways Caribbean identity fits into and contributes to a larger Black cultural heritage.

At its heart, Hang Time asks what holds a community together in moments of vulnerability and loss – and what remains suspended in the air after someone disappears.

“Hang Time is beautiful, high-energy and virtuosic, and there’s real joy in it. But that pleasure exists right alongside the more emotional and psychological dimensions of grief. I’m interested in how dance can abstract those experiences without making them any less real: grief can become rhythm, exhaustion, virtuosity, decoration, repetition, a body falling, another body carrying it. For me, movement is probably the most apt form for synthesising the complexity of everything that Hang Time is dealing with.

I want audiences to fall in love with this group of people, and to become invested in them as they move through something together. There’s a real collectivity to the work, but also a sense that grief changes the relationships between them and changes what we see in each person. The movement is big, athletic, decorative, and maximalist. There are jumps, balleticism, social dances, moments of heightened virtuosity, but also exhaustion, collapse, and bodies having to support one another whilst negotiating challenging and complex movement language.”

(Malik Nashad Sharpe)

Malik Nashad Sharpe works internationally as a choreographer, movement director, and creative strategist across art, fashion, and music. Under the alias Marikiscrycrycry, he develops choreographic worlds between horror, fantasy, and social reality, where intensity, loss of control, and emotional extremes collide. His hybrid movement language combines social and commercial dance forms with contemporary choreography, pushing bodies to their limits.

Following the acclaim of DARK, HAPPY, to the CORE in Düsseldorf in 2024, Sharpe returned to tanzhaus nrw in May 2026 with Winin’ & Liming – a gathering he curated with local artists, activists, and community voices across dance, exchange, and care. Now he returns with Hang Time: a new work full of physical force, beauty, and joy – and at the same time an intense exploration of loss, community, and how we carry one another through grief.

Duration: 60 min

Content awareness: This performance includes distressing themes such as violence, profanities and mentions of suicide. It also features strobe, haze and loud music