In Temporary Boyfriend, Permanent Lasting Power from Nile Harris and Malcolm-x Betts
Daniella Brito, The Brooklyn Rail
Daniella Brito, The Brooklyn Rail

Having “staticky energy” with someone is one of my favorite sayings: the colloquialism describes the unspoken friction that binds two people. It’s this uncomfortable kinetic charge that might resemble the residue of tension between oneself and a past love interest or the tacit, pent-up distrust between overachieving colleagues-turned-competitors.
Longtime collaborators Nile Harris and Malcolm-x Betts linger within this contentious realm of proximity in their latest work, Temporary Boyfriend—a sold-out show at the Chocolate Factory Theater co-presented with Under the Radar Festival and Ping Chong and Company. The performance artists have amassed a following for their sensationalist performances on stage and online: they love to keep us questioning the afterlife of live performance while never quite pronouncing the show to be over. In Temporary Boyfriend, they suspend the audience in a fever dream of fickle relationality as they embody lovers, enemies, and friends on stage, loosely inspired by the intimacies of their real-life connection.
From the onset, Harris and Betts fabricate a porous division between the registers that chart the material world and the not-so-fictitious scenarios that color the performative. Harris seems to have a predilection for psychologically abrupt entrances that make me astutely aware of my own subjectivity as a spectator, patiently awaiting constructed action. Like in his previous works such as this house is not a home and minor b, Temporary Boyfriend begins with a disorienting, rapid-fire opening.
Plunging the audience into darkness, the two artists break through the backstage doors riding noisy Citi Bikes. They tussle for viewership between flickering red bike lights while they wheel combatively around the space, as if weaving through traffic on a busy street at nightfall. But when the warm stage lights twinkle back on, the artists come together—they help each other balance on top of handlebars with tender concentration before slinking into an improvisatory dance number.
Here, I am reminded of a courting dance as Betts and Harris greet each other with daring gazes. The artists tumble into complementary sequences of syncopated flight, twirling and hopping around each others’ bodies with the balletic angularity one might spot in an Alvin Ailey production. The score, live mixed by GENG PTP, then begins to drawl into a haunting cacophony of techno and ghetto house—a disquieting yet intoxicating interlude that seems to simulate a rousing night out. As the pace speeds up, and a bassy ballroom track thunders, I catch glimpses of the dramatic death drops popular in ballroom culture. The artists plummet into these descents between the kind of quick footwork repeated across dances on TikTok. And like clockwork, GENG PTP broadcasts the pronounced timbre of the compulsory social media platform, momentarily zapping us into cyberspace.
In the midst of their frenzy of quaking gestures, Harris and Betts appear to be dueling for likes, or maybe street cred, or perhaps stage time—competing arenas for prospective virality that tend to collide into a bricolage of sightlines across Temporary Boyfriend. When the artists finally concede the match, panting and dripping sweat, they embrace at the center of the stage: they rapidly gyrate their hips like lovers cruising beneath shadowy lampposts—end scene.
But in the sequence that follows, Harris and Betts figuratively usher us behind the scenes, painting a portrait of their authentic rapport as friends and collaborators through dramaturgical lenses. The artists dangle atop spotlit scaffolding on opposite ends of the theater; they cackle about being Black in America, a sugar addiction, and the moves they just performed. I chuckle as Harris, recalling one move, shoots his leg up high and cites Ailey. “This is a downtown dance!” Betts exclaims. The self-referential conversation is at once cheeky and annotative: through humor they tease out the dance lineages from which they descend, gently disentangling yesteryear’s avant garde from their current aesthetic concerns.
In ways both subtle and not, the artists do not stop reminding us that they are embarking on a new approach to dance and theater—one that juggles a variety of vantages and wayfinding methods, decimating all attempts at structural linearity. Betts and Harris are irreverent guides and provocateurs throughout this meandering odyssey. They always manage to challenge where we think the stage ends with delirious transitions that tend to bridge further dimensionality.
During the final changeover, Harris writhes and trembles as if he is catching the spirit. “It’s never too late… it’s never too late,” he echoes with chilling reverberation. Overhead, gospel music summons us to church until grating noise and alarming lights signal forthcoming collapse, marking the beginning of the end, where darkness reigns again. Like the limbo before the underworld, the backstage doors tear open, flooding white light. And from this sunken place, Betts and Harris emerge as agents of chaos, pirouetting with colossal light rods in hand that look like they have been ripped from the architecture of the theater itself. It’s clear that this is what they wanted—a gradual disintegration of the stage, of the theater, of the containers designed to hold what we call “performance.”
I am at the edge of my seat when Harris and Betts let it all come crumbling down. The allusion of the theater, the pedagogies that designed it, and the metaphorical veil displacing the audience all seem to dissolve when Harris shoots a gun into the air and erupts with laughter—end scene. “Wow… drama…,” he says, passing the gun to Betts who is lathered in baby oil after commanding the theater in evocative red light, stroking his glossy body like a diva in a music video. The overhead lights blare back on, returning us to the play’s mediated reality, and the two friends argue over for whom they should fire their final bullet. “A free Palestine? The fires in Los Angeles? Brian Rogers of The Chocolate Factory Theater?” They end up popping one off for Judith Jamison, the celebrated dancer and former artistic director of Alvin Ailey, because, “who else would they be dancing so hard for?”
I am left wondering what Jamison would think about all this. The post-modernists of her milieu preached that life can be art; they developed distinctive gestural vocabularies from the everyday rhythms that informed Black life. But as Harris and Betts incisively reveal throughout Temporary Boyfriend, the question is no longer can life be art? It is, when is life not art? Is there ever an end to the stage? Do we even want there to be an end?
Daniella Brito for The Brooklyn Rail, January 2025.