“Nothing happens only when it happens,” writes Ross Gay in “Be Holding,” his acclaimed book-length 2021 poem that spins a single iconic basketball move from 1980 into a passionate meditation on togetherness, care and Black life in America.

Now the live performance built around the poem, which premiered in 2023, in Philadelphia, is itself happening again as part of the 59^th Carnegie International.

The remounted show features two performers reciting the poem, inspired by Hall of Famer Julius “Dr. J” Erving’s famous “baseline scoop” basket in Game 4 of the 1980 NBA finals, with live music and a small troupe of student performers. It gets two performances on the International’s opening weekend, Sat., May 2, and Sun., May 3, at the Hill District’s Thelma Lovette YMCA. (The May 2 show is sold out.)

The International, Pittsburgh’s largest showcase of international art, features work by some 60 artists and collectives. Opening weekend includes a number of performances and special events at the museum and other satellite locations.

The Carnegie’s Ryan Inouye says he and his fellow International co-curators commissioned the new version of “Be Holding” after seeing the 2023 premiere production.

“We were just floored by it,” Inouye said. He said the show’s blend of poetry, new music and theater with community performers in a community space expressed the themes of collective effort suggested in the International’s title, “if the word we.”

“This is really emblematic of what we are trying to build within the exhibition,” he said.

‘Black flight and Black genius’

Gay is known for works like his best-selling 2019 collection “The Book of Delights.” He’s a basketball player and fan who grew up near Philadelphia, but was just 5 when the 76ers’ Dr. J seemed to defy gravity in a baseline drive against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Los Angeles Lakers that ended in a reverse layup.

As Gay describes the move, Erving left his feet on the baseline and, finding his path to a straightforward dunk blocked by a Lakers defender, “simply decided, in the air, to knock on other doors by soaring more.”

Bill O’Driscoll

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90.5 WESA

“Have you ever decided anything … anything … in the air?” Gay asks in the poem.

Gay studied the play obsessively on YouTube, and produced a poem that marries an anatomy of that moment to thoughts about the Middle Passage, Black flight, music and more. “Ross Gay takes one fluid human gesture and through it expands the lungs of personal and communal history so they might hold all joy, terror, and violence of this world,” wrote the American poet and editor Gabrielle Calvocoressi.

Before he’d even finished writing “Be Holding,” his friend Brooke O’Hara, a theater artist, convinced him it should also be the basis for a live performance.

“It is a beautiful poem about Black flight and Black genius, and it definitely addresses how we look at each other and how we engage each other through the point of holding and caring for and embracing each other, and through joy,” O’Harra said. “There are moments when [Gay] kind of analyzes a kind of looking that is about violence and pain, but always is turning back to how do we look with joy, and how do we look at Black images, and understand and experience the Black experience as one of genius and flight and joy.”

The show was created in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tyshawn Sorey and New York-based new-music quartet Yarn/Wire.

‘Embody these moves’

O’Harra developed choreography for the original show with a small ensemble of high-school students and the Philadelphia-based poets and performers David Gaines and Yolanda Wisher, who performed the text in the premiere production, at Philadelphia’s Girard College.

“Be holding is a Black epic poem, which we don’t really see many of them. A 90-page poem about a five second YouTube clip,” said Gaines. “And Black in a way that it is still human that anyone can get anything from the piece.”

Gaines again takes a lead role in the Pittsburgh production, this time joined by Gay himself. Yarn/Wire will perform the partly improvised score on two grand pianos and a pair of large percussion ensembles including drums, chimes and gongs. And a group of performers from Pittsburgh-area high schools worked with O’Harra to develop their version of the show.

“We are just letting them embody these moves and see what it looks like on stage or with the music,” said O’Harra during a Sunday rehearsal this past February, in Downtown’s Trust Arts Education Center.

The general idea is to turn basketball moves into dance moves, to the tune of composer Sorley’s atmospheric score.

“I like the basketball aspect,” said Isaac Walker, a Mt. Lebanon High School sophomore who’s in the show. “I’m not on a team, but I would say I’m pretty good. And it was an interesting opportunity.”

As Gay learned after publishing “Be Holding,” few young folks recall Dr. J, who retired from the NBA in 1987, let alone his iconic baseline move against the Lakers. (In 1980, Michael Jordan was still in high school and LeBron James was not yet born.)

“I would say it’s about Ross’ like point of view in life, like with basketball and without, like his experiences in just being Black in America,” Walker said.

‘A grounded setting’

“Be Holding” performer Gigi Dutrieuille, a City High student and aspiring actor, said in February she hadn’t yet read Gay’s entire poem. “I got through like half of it, low-key, and left it in my bedroom for the time being,” she said.

Because all the show’s adult performers are based in other cities (O’Harra in Philadelphia), rehearsals were confined to one weekend in February and the week before the show. This past Monday, students met O’Harra in the Thelma Lovette gym to finalize the choreography.

Courtesy of Brooke O’Harra

Despite challenges like getting transportation to the venue for the late-afternoon-into-evening rehearsals, and finding time to complete homework, the young performers remained enthused about the project, doing movement exercises and passing basketballs as a way of establishing communication.

The Y’s gym was closed for several days for the load-in, on-site rehearsals and this weekend’s performance. The court sat outlined with audio, video and power cables, with a monitors facing out to the low bleachers where the audience will sit, and a screen for projected video suspended above the floor at half-court.

David Gaines, who’d performed “Be Holding” in the gym of Girard College, said the venue remains apt.

“I love being in a gym space because this poem is clearly about practicality, it is about togetherness, it is about community and it’s about basketball!” he said. “And so to be able to do a piece like this in a grounded setting, reflects really all the values that the poem is about.”