Behind the RED Series

By UMS

Marks of RED

Following the raw intensity of BLACK HOLE in UMS’s 24/25 season, dance collective TRIBE returns with Marks of RED, the fourth installment of choreographer and performer Shamel Pitts’s RED Series. Beginning with Lake of RED in 2020, the series has grown through performances, residencies, and collaborations to explore the many ways Blackness can be experienced, expressed, and imagined.

While the BLACK Series looked outward, examining the ways Blackness is perceived and represented, the RED Series turns inward. Across each installment, Pitts considers the complexity within Black identity: the memories carried, the relationships built, movement through the world, and the possibilities that emerge when those experiences come together.

Explore the progression of the RED Series leading up to Pitts’s latest creation:

Lake of RED

The RED Series began during an extraordinary moment. Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lake of RED is a poetic audiovisual performance shaped by a time when live performance was largely confined to isolated and fragmented spaces.

The work takes place inside a box, reflecting the physical and emotional constraints of that moment. Pitts’s lyrical poetry moves through the work as an undercurrent, creating a meditation on isolation, reflection, and connection.

Lake of RED established many of the ideas that would continue throughout the series: the body as a site of memory and expression, the relationship between inner and outer worlds, and the possibility of finding connection even within separation.

Solace of RED

From there, the RED Series expanded beyond a single work and into a larger creative process.

Initiated in 2020, Solace of RED was a performance art residency and incubator that gave artists space to experiment, collaborate, and develop new work across disciplines. Across five editions from 2020–2025, the project brought together TRIBE artists and invited guest artists, supporting the creation of three new live performance works and one art installation.

The residency became another way to explore the ideas at the heart of RED: not just through finished performances, but through experimentation, collaboration, and the development of individual voices within a shared creative environment.

That community continues into Marks of RED. Two artists who developed work through Solace of RED, Ashley Pierre-Louis and Marcella Lewis, will perform in the new work.

Touch of RED

The ideas of connection and collaboration took another form in Touch of RED, a multidisciplinary duet exploring Black masculinity and the space between strength and vulnerability.

Set inside a boxing ring, the work transforms a space traditionally associated with competition into a place for connection, compassion, and healing. The performers draw from boxing, Lindy Hop, Gaga movement, and nightlife, creating a physical language that can be both forceful and tender.

With Touch of RED, the series continued to ask how Black identity can hold seemingly opposing experiences at once — strength and vulnerability, individuality and connection, intensity and joy.

Marks of RED

Now, the RED Series enters its fourth installment with Marks of RED — and Pitts is taking the series somewhere new.

Centered on six women, Marks of RED explores how memories shape the way we move, experience our bodies, and connect with one another. Pitts draws from his experiences with butoh and sumo alongside the energy of Detroit techno, creating movement that can feel intensely grounded one moment and charged with the energy of a dance floor the next.

The work also represents a major shift for Pitts as an artist. For the first time, he will not perform in his own TRIBE work. Instead, he steps offstage to focus entirely on choreographing and building the world of Marks of RED for its six performers.

That shift is significant. After using his own body as a central part of the RED Series, Pitts is now creating space for six women to carry the work forward. Their bodies, memories, relationships, and perspectives become the center of this next chapter.

The result is a work that feels unlike anything else in the RED Series: surreal but physical, futuristic but rooted in the body. Marks of RED takes the questions that have developed across the series and opens them outward again, asking what happens when memory becomes movement — and what becomes possible when we make space for the experiences that live within us.