“How do you counter anti-hegemonic work in a hegemonic space?” asks Rashaad Newsome in the new documentary Assembly. Working between technology, collage, sculpture, video, music and performance, the artist had just been commissioned to make a piece for the enormous Wade Thompson Drill Hall inside Manhattan’s historic Park Avenue Armory. The documentary, co-directed by Newsome and Johnny Symons, chronicles the making of its namesake work of art.
As a gay Black man, Newsome is keenly aware that he is working in a space that proudly displays portraits of white military officers. “I have never truly felt protected in this country,” he says. “I think this show is a reclaiming. There'll be a new kind of drill happening in here. A drill that’s associated with liberation. These spaces are everybody’s spaces.”
His resulting piece, Assembly (2022), is a “multi-experiential work” deployed in classroom, exhibition and performance spaces. The centrepiece is a pageant based on voguing—the dance pioneered in the Black and Latino gay ballroom scene of the 1960s—mixed with traditional dances from around the world.
Film still from Assembly (2025)
Newsome invited people to “submit a clip of your performance!” and brought in dancers from Japan, Ukraine, Brazil and beyond to New York. Together, they created “an open source code, with its language comprised of five elements: hand performance, catwalk, floor performance, spin dips and duck walking”, yielding a “global hackathon or code fest with dancers functioning as the programmers”, he says.
Meanwhile in the classroom, our guide is Being, Newsome’s non-binary artificial intelligence (AI) host. The artist calls it a griot, a West African cultural figure that serves a storyteller, historian, artist and healer. Its head looks like a Congolese mask set atop a stylised body. Being conducts workshops and answers questions.
“You create an artwork, you put it in a room to start a conversation,” Newsome says. “I thought, well, what happens if that artwork can not only start the conversation but participate in it audibly… think of it as an AI with a radical library card highlighting alternate histories like bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Michel Foucault and Audre Lorde.”
Film still from Assembly (2025), with Rashaad Newsome at centre
Newsome also decorates the vast hall, pulsating in video-mapped walls, with a 40ft-tall hologram of dancers and images of fractals that he says are at the heart of African design.
For three weeks, the space is taken over by evening performances: "rap shows, spoken word, musical theatre, dance and opera”, Newsome says. Participating artists include the musician Kyron EL singing like an angel and the dancers and choreographers Maleek Washington, Kameron N. Saunders and Omari Wiles. We see and hear a number of performers shunned on the street for their queer identity, but they are all embraced here. “Some of the rules that are created by society don’t exist in this world,” Newsome says. “Assembly is a whole new world.”
Even when the last performance at the armory ends, “we’re just getting started”, Newsome says. “Liberation is a journey, not a destination. Period.”
Watch the trailer for Assembly:
- Assembly premieres on PBS’s Independent Lens on 22 June
