Shamel Pitts' Marks of RED, the first work he does not perform in, will make its New York City debut in January at Lincoln Center — the campus where the choreographer attended both high school and college. "My formative years were spent there, so to bring my work there is a huge moment for me," Pitts tells Dance Magazine.

Marks of RED premiered earlier this year. Set within a womb-like environment designed by Mimi Lien, it sends six Black women and femmes through a practice Pitts describes as "marking memories" back to the mother's womb. The dancers channel butoh, nightlife culture, sumo wrestling, and the divine feminine in an exploration of memory and Black embodiment.

The title carries personal weight. Pitts' mother went into labor while out dancing with friends and gave birth to him in a taxi on the way to the hospital. "She either danced me out of her womb, or I danced myself out of her womb," he says. After his birth, family members commented on his skin tone, saying, "He's not so Black—he's red." "Red" became his lifelong nickname.

Pitts grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, dancing at his mother's parties and with informal hip-hop crews. He auditioned for Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School without formal training — his first time in tights and ballet shoes, kicking the barre during battements. He got in. "I think they saw some openness and curiosity and imagination that made them feel I was worth taking a risk on," he says. He later trained at The Ailey School, then won the Martha Hill Award at The Juilliard School.

At Juilliard, Ohad Naharin came to set a piece. Pitts, unfamiliar with the choreographer, watched a video of Naharin's solo King of Wara and was moved to tears. "It overwhelmed me—it ignited something inside," he says. Dancing Gaga, Naharin's movement language, "unlocked the human and animalistic and primal part of my body and my dancing that I had connected to when I was a kid," Pitts says. "There was so much about what happens to my body in nightlife spaces that was also coming up in Gaga."

After Juilliard, he performed with Mikhail Baryshnikov's Hell's Kitchen Dance and Ballets Jazz Montréal before Naharin offered him a spot in the Batsheva Ensemble. Pitts joined the main Batsheva Dance Company in 2010. He was the only Black dancer in the company and one of few Black Americans in Tel Aviv. "I felt hyper-visible, which sometimes was alienating," he says.

His first choreography, the 30-minute solo BLACK BOX, premiered on his 30th birthday in 2015, in his apartment, for 30 friends. He built it with a producer, two DJs, a body-paint artist, and a projection artist — an early signal of his commitment to collaboration. "I started to research movement that didn't move so much," he says, describing durational tableaus that simmered with intensity.

He left Batsheva the next year, moved to Brazil to create BLACK VELVET with Mirelle Martins, and completed the trilogy with BLACK HOLE, born after the 2016 election. "I got really interested in black holes as a potential portal to a place where we can further our shared humanity," he says. For Pitts, Afrofuturism "is an ethos" rather than an aesthetic — one that values radical imagination, Black prosperity, and liberation.

Melanie George, who curated Touch of RED at Jacob's Pillow and now works with Pitts as a dramaturg — or "artistic doula" — first saw his work in 2018. "I thought, This is different than anything I've ever seen," she says. "He also drew a crowd that I didn't normally see at dance performances. I don't know anyone who is doing what he is doing, or the way he is doing it."

George adds: "He's able to simultaneously center Blackness and an individual voice. He's in the avant-garde space but also in the center and being celebrated. His work is of America but not American at all; it's of Earth, but also futuristic, but also super-present."

In 2019, Pitts returned to Brooklyn and launched TRIBE, a performing-arts collective. "I felt like, 'Where is Red?'" he says. "No one called me Red anymore. I wanted to tap back into my roots, and the neighborhoods that raised me."

TRIBE has produced work by its own members, including Marcella Lewis, who performs in Marks of RED and uses the collective's resources for budgeting, grant writing, and marketing. "I feel like I'm part of something unique and innovative that can lead the dance world into a better space," Lewis says.

The RED Series began with the quarantine film Lake of RED, followed by Touch of RED, developed partly at a Jacob's Pillow residency — where Pitts witnessed the Doris Duke Theatre burn down in November 2020. The fire's trauma lives on in the piece, staged in a futuristic boxing ring. Delayed again by the death of Pillow staff member Kat Sirico, Touch of RED finally opened the Pillow season this past summer in the new Doris Duke. "It feels like a phoenix rising from the ashes of that devastation," Pitts says.

Poet Claudia Rankine, who collaborated with Pitts on her play Help and sits on the TRIBE board, praises his leadership: "He has the enviable quality of being clear about his own vision without losing his sense of humor. He's both humble and sure, and that combination allows you to follow him wherever he wants to go."

Pitts now focuses on growing TRIBE, including TRIBE Studios, a platform inviting artists and community members into the collective's process — which he likens to the atelier at a fashion house. He recently purchased a Brooklyn condo serving as his home and TRIBE headquarters, with offices, communal spaces, and guest bedrooms for visiting artists.

The offstage work, he says, extends the Afrofuturistic ethos of his choreography: "It's a call to action for artists from the diaspora to create new stories, and imagine a future where we thrive. And to be a part of the creation of that future."