Assembly is a breathtaking feat that weaves the fascinating life, inspirations and creative process of interdisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome into the thrilling story of the build-up to his landmark exhibition of the same name at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in 2022. Co-directed by Newsome and Johnny Symons, this feature documentary is a monumental, profoundly moving and transformative work of art in itself that is propelled by stunning visuals and a dynamic score by M Jamison, with music by Newsome, M Jamison, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, and Cristobal Tapia de Veer.
The film opens with Newsome swimming in a pool in present-day America. The action then shifts to a harrowing CGI animated historical scene depicting slaves being thrown overboard to drown. It immediately sets the ambitious tone of a film, and an artist’s work, where everything is connected, including a deep, timeless bond to ancestry and generational trauma. The film takes us from humanity at its worst, to the expansive, unlimited possibility of all of us at our freest.
When it comes to including Newsome’s life story, the film takes an emotional biographical approach, rather than merely presenting the facts. In an intimate sequence towards the beginning, a year before the Park Avenue Armory show, we are in Newsome’s hotel room as he dresses to go to his beloved father’s funeral, we then see him comfort his grieving mother in church and choking up as he delivers a eulogy, quoting bell hooks. We get a sense of what it must have been like for him to grow up as a Black queer kid in Boutte, Louisiana, despite having supportive parents who uplifted him. His mother, Florence, says she always knew that he would leave home in search of himself and recalls that she and her late husband of 46 years, Blanch, always encouraged their child to “push against the grain and ask questions”. Noting that he is returning as a “proud queer man”, Newsome says that is something still so unfamiliar to Boutte that he “may as well be a unicorn”.
diasporic fractals inspired by the geometry within traditional African culture. Photo credit: Keenan Newman.
Assembly the show is directly born from the isolation that Newsome felt growing up in rural Louisiana and an expansion of his collage series Punks, reclaiming the word he heard around him in the South whenever “somebody was speaking negatively on a Black gay man”. Assembly builds its own world that depicts “Black queer people in a state of joy and togetherness”. Throughout the film, Newsome conveys his artistic vision in an accessible and enticing way without watering it down. Such as when he is discussing “the diasporic traditions” of collage and improvisation which inform his visual and performance work as he sets out to “create an experience that feels expansive”.
We accompany Newsome as he visits the vast empty space of the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall and envisions the celebration of Black queer culture that will “reclaim” a space associated with the militia of a colonized nation. As Newsome surveys the halls of the building filled with portraits of white military figures, he reflects on how he has “never felt fully protected in this country”. Newsome’s work is ignited by a glorious rebelliousness, with him describing the world he has built through his art as a place where everything “shines or blings in defiance of people who try to dim our light.” While forces set out to limit, Newsome intends his work to “emancipate our imaginations”. Later in the film, as the time comes to assemble Assembly, we follow Newsome as he cleanses the space by burning sage and making his mark on it by running a broom, which he has urinated on, over its wooden paneled walls.
Washington. Photo Credit: Stephanie Berger.
Eight months before the show, Newsome puts out a global call from his California studio for vogue fem performers who mix vogue with aspects of their local traditional forms of dance. It is richly satisfying to see the process go from casting to collaborating in the rehearsal room to the final night of performance. Dancers we follow include Brazilian Puma Camillê who blends capoeira with vogue in her work, sharing that vogue showed her “how to be herself with power”; Ukranian Dana Vitkovski who mixes hopak with vogue; and Japanese Koppi Mizrahi who mixes bon odori with vogue.
We also get a meaningful insight into Newsome’s collaboration with poet and performance artist Dazié Grego-Sykes, as well as musical director and vocalist Kyron EL. The latter opens up to Newsome about trauma in his past and what it was like for him growing up in Jamaica, Queens as a “Black chubby gay kid” feeling “unsafe”, “hiding” and “invisible” – exactly the kind of feelings that the artist aims to counter with Assembly, with Kyron an integral part of its success.
Performer Nekia Zulu is among the Black trans women involved in the show who share their experience of walking through the world, with Nekia reflecting on how she takes her “looming fear” of being in public, even in New York City, and “turns it into confidence” with “weaponized femininity”. Newsome creates a space of empowerment and healing that acknowledges the pain of the outside world, including a poignant memorial to trans women of colour lost to violence and a dance meditation on the heavy toll of HIV/AIDS on the Black queer community.
Observing Newsome at work, we see his approach is to inspire and enable as he guides, encourages and pushes his collaborators to go beyond what they might have thought possible and beyond their comfort zones to achieve a singular vision, where every detail has been orchestrated by Newsome with precision and intention.
poet, educator and healer. Photo credit: Rashaad Newsome Studio.
Assembly’s performance space at the Armory is overseen by a counter-hegemonic Artificial Intelligence creation named Being. They speak with a blend of Newsome’s own voice and that of his studio manager Zenabu Abubakari, and move with fierce flamboyance based on two vogue dancers. Movement that is described by Newsome—which could be applied to his work in general—as “pure queer magic”. Visually, Being’s nonbinary avatar is “a nod to a post-race, post-gender futurity” inspired by African art, which as Newsome points out, is “the root of Abstractionism” in art.
Camillê of Brazil and Koppi Mizrahi of Japan. Photo credit: Keenan Newman.
Being is designed to conduct decolonization workshops with visitors to the show which break down the interconnected systems of oppression described by bell hooks’ theory of the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that dominates and shapes our society. Rather than pulling from all available information online like many other AIs, Being has been programmed with a “counter-hegemonic algorithm” that draws upon the work of alternative thinkers like hooks, Paulo Friere, Michel Foucault and Audre Lorde. As Newsome succinctly puts it, “think of it as an AI with a radical library card”. One of the thrilling elements of the film is the way that Being—a “poet, healer and storyteller”—is incorporated, including riveting one-on-one conversations between creation, the curious “child”, and creator, Being’s “Father”, Newsome.
Having commissioned a sculpture for the exhibition, we accompany Newsome to Accra in Ghana to guide and oversee its creation by a local craftsman and artist as we witness another meaningful collaboration in progress. As a descendant of Ghana and a “displaced African”, Newsome reflects on his ancestry and the preset-day illegality of queerness in the country, where there continues to be a push to criminalize simply identifying as LGBTQ+ or even as an ally. In one incredibly affecting scene, we see Newsome alone in a Cape Coast jail where slaves were held before being boarded onto ships bound for the Americas. He walks the room, touching the brick walls with his hand as he asks those who were once held there to give him their power.
Assembly is a rich, extraordinary documentary that takes its lead from Newsome’s expansive, inspiring and invigorating process as an artist. Not only does it capture the excitement and anticipation of putting on a show and the thrill of seeing it come together from conception to execution, but it compellingly delivers the emotional human stories of many of those involved and presents us with some profound questions. That it never feels overloaded or unfocused, is partly thanks to editor Ash Verwiel who has a keen sense for when to keep things pacy, while allowing certain scenes space to breathe. If you missed the New York show, you’ll likely come away from this film kicking yourself that you did not get to experience it first hand, but Assembly certainly gives the viewer a vibrant, moving sense of what it was like to be there while brilliantly contextualising it.
By James Kleinmann
Assembly received its world premiere at SXSW and its international premiere at BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. Upcoming festival screenings include NewFest Pride on Sunday, June 1st at 4pm and Frameline’s 49th San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival on Friday, June 27th at 5:45pm.
