Makini (jumatatu m. poe) is an artist based in Philadelphia, who grew up dancing in the living room and at parties with his siblings and cousins. His “formal” training includes international traditional and contemporary dance techniques, with a personal focus on joy, physical health, and Black aesthetics. Makini uses performance, media, and environmental location to create performance work that destabilizes notions of identity, especially Black queer identity. He remains interested in examining the space—or creating the space—within Black art forms for queer Black futures. Through the fabulation of alternate, or unreal, narratives of history and imagined futures, Makini creates nuance, subtlety, and happiness in relationship to Black narratives frequently rooted in realities of extreme loss, invisibility or hyper-visibility, and erasure. For nine years, he has practiced with the Black queer art form, J-Sette, which first publicly emerged from majorette lines at historically Black universities. He approached the form as a court tradition, containing within it ideas about societal formation, hierarchy, and situating of a society within relationship to larger environments. With terrestrial, his team will fabulate image-based renderings of future beings looking back to the general region of this present historical moment, performing court dances structured from reimagined historical narratives.