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Lloyd Knight Illuminates the Stage at Graham and Beyond
Marina Harss, Dance Magazine
© 2023
January 20, 2023

There are performances that stay seared in your brain. Lloyd Knight’s interpretation of Molissa Fenley’s marathon solo State of Darkness in 2021 was one of them. Over the course of 35 minutes, alone on the Joyce Theater stage, Knight appeared to pass through various physical and mental states, from the serenity of an eagle in flight to alarm and physical frenzy, and, finally, to a kind of bliss, beyond time and space. And through it all, he maintained a precision, purity and beauty of movement that spoke of transcendence and absolute physical control. It was both an out-of-body and a profoundly in-the-body experience.

Fenley created State of Darkness to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1988. In 2020, during the pandemic, she brought it back to the stage, first for online distribution and then, in 2021, for live performance. Seven dancers performed the solo, all exceptional. But Knight’s interpretation felt transformational, like a kind of molting. “The experience changed me,” Knight says. “You go through a full journey, and by the end you feel like a completely different person.”

What had helped propel him to that state, he explains, was a mixture of his admiration for Fenley—“She’s so ballsy, and I wanted it to be that ballsy too”—and his hunger to fully experience everything the solo threw at him. “I wanted to push myself to the max,” he says, “in every way.” He worked and worked, until the piece became part of him. “I think what was special about him,” Fenley says, “is that he found something very new for himself in it. There was a sense of exploratory delight."...

https://www.dancemagazine.com/lloyd-knight/

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