“Assembly” (2025) offers a behind the scenes look at interdisciplinary artist, codirector and “proud queer man” Rashaad Newsome’s exhibit at the Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall in Manhattan, which ran from Friday, February 18 through Sunday, March 6, 2022. It is Newsome’s first feature documentary, and he collaborated with his co-director and San Francisco Bay resident Johnny Symons. The film begins soon after Newsome’s father, Blanch Newsome, died on July 16, 2021, and eight months before the exhibit opened. The preparations for the Afro-futuristic exhibit involves a global, multimedia collaboration (musical, dance and theater) with numerous artists. As an exhibit, Assembly functions as a classroom, exhibit and performance. Even though it is unusual, unlike anything that you have seen, and the discourse may go over your head, if you can go with the flow, the spectacle and emotion behind it should land.
“Assembly” is autobiographical as all the participants confide about their relationship with art. Newsome is the main protagonist as he travels from his hometown in Butte, Louisiana to Oakland, Manhattan and as far away as Ghana to realize his work. His rhetoric may be confusing to viewers unaccustomed to artistic dialogue, but he is not pretentious. He is using unfamiliar language for concepts that were not permitted to exist in open spaces like queerness, Blackness, African culture, oppression, etc. Of course, just looking around now at Presidon’t’s digital deletion of language* even when it is not rooted in identity makes that phenomenon more understandable. If people keep erasing words, they sound awkward when they reappear deliberately to keep people from opening their minds. He then applies his love of technology and scientific concepts to the world of creative expression, which can make everything sound even more confusing.
Newsome created an interactive, nonbinary AI, his child, called Being: The Digital Griot, “a West African cultural figure who acts as an archive, poet, healer and storyteller.” Being’s voice combines Newsome’s voice with his studio manager, Zanabu Abubakari, who frequently appears as a spiritual and cultural advisor, but does not get profiled, which feels like a glaring omission unless she requested it. Because AI is usually equated with killer robots or a danger to human beings, this experiment does not get received as smoothly as Newsome’s other work. Apparently some people never learned from “The Animatrix” (2003). A whole documentary could be devoted to Newsome explaining his concepts like Blackness and queerness paralleled to a fractal or how enslavers saw Black people as technology. There is a strong sci-fi aesthetic to his work, and the space is likened to a spaceship.
Each of the dancers get a segment that explain how their interpretation of voguing incorporates a traditional form of dance from their national origin. Brazilian Puma Camillê utilizers capoeira, a martial arts dance, to add a masculine note to fem voguing. Ukrainian Dana Vitkovski injects Ukrainian folk dance, hopak, into the duck walks. Japanese Koppi Mizrahi references Bon Odori, a six-hundred-year-old dance. Choreographers Ousmnane Omari Wilkes sees his work as a way for LGBTQ people to “fight back through movement.” Others like choreographer Kameron Saunders, dancer Stanley Glover and dancer Robes “Silk” Mason interpret their thinking behind their movements, including a memorial to those lost to the AIDS pandemic. During the performance, there are videos of dancers infusing vogue with traditions from South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, France/Reunion Island and Malaysia. Even if everything else sounds off putting and too esoteric to the average viewer, the dancing is worth the entry price. If it was possible, it would have been outstanding to see a fusion of vogue with Tanggai or the Long fingernail dance from Indonesia.
Kyron El, the musical director and vocalist, gets the most screen time after Newsome and explains how pivotal this exhibit is to his life. Like Newsome, Dazié Rusto Grego-Sykes, a poet and performance artist who acts as a kind of MC, has roots in the older vogueing community and adds historicity to the proceeding. While it is chronicling the creation of a rigorous artwork, “Assembly” is also the next generation of films involving fem voguing and balls like “Paris is Burning” (1990) and “Kiki” (2016) with the deliberate energy of reversing the phenomenon of hatred and fear from the external world into adoration in that space directed at trans people. It is so ridiculous how difference is despised until it becomes a product to be consumed. Oludare Bernard connects the dance to the Black diasporic experience. Even though Newsome explicitly acknowledges that he is not creating a safe space, but a place to take risks, he never prioritizes his artistic vision over the people that he works with. It really does appear to be a space of healing and transformation. Newsome takes people’s concerns seriously and will alter his vision to accommodate and work around their trauma.
As the documentary unfolds, transwomen rappers, Bella Bags, Ms. Boogie, Trannilish, take center stage. Transwoman stylist Kimberly Jones keeps it real and explicit—even living In New York City is dangerous. One harrowing sequence shows statuesque dancer Nekia Zulu navigating the street and shows how people are staring her down, but not in a good way. She explains how she survives: “taking fear and translating it into confidence,” i.e. “weaponized femininity.”
When it all comes together and the live performance is recorded, it makes “The Fifth Element” (1997) seem dull and drab in comparison. Anything that seemed strange in prototype is compelling, memorable and gorgeous once realized. If “Black Panther” (2018) tickled your fancy, and you don’t have a homo- or transphobic bone in your body, this masterpiece will retroactively make that film seem comparatively sedate and regressive. It really is some next level stuff. While everyone is thinking in the language of dystopia, Newsome and his collaborators are living their best lives zooming ahead of the universe of “Star Trek.”
“Assembly” does not take itself too seriously. Anytime Newsome meets with the people who work at the Park Avenue Armory, it is obvious that they are in over their heads but do not want to admit that they have no idea what he is talking about. Rebecca Robertson, President and Executive producer, is a good sport, but her physicality betrays the discomfort that her enthusiastic voice disguises. She says, “I’m just in love with this project” as she holds her head with one hand and musses her hair. In an earlier scene, she cheers him on while politely trying to get him to stop a cleansing ritual. My kingdom for a reaction shot when she discovers all the ingredients to that ritual! While it would have been a distraction, there are frequent references to the history of the Park Avenue Armory and montages of the paintings and archival photographs. It would have been nice if there was a fact check to determine if the artists’ instincts about the building’s possible tarnished history was correct.
“Assembly” is a challenging and rewarding participatory documentary where Newsome tries to elevate everyone in proximity to him as a call to liberation and adventure. Especially now during a chaotic time when everything that the documentary stands for is under attack, it feels like a perfect, defiant statement of resilient existence more solid and authentic that their enemies. “We’re still here.” This utopian documentary is needed more than ever.
