Corey Smith and Rachel Lindsay reflect on the March 2025 premiere of Nora Sharp’s COSMIC DOCKS at the Chicago Solo Spotlight Festival for Sixty Inches from Center: “What does it mean to find one’s true self? Performer Nora Sharp explores the question in their ‘trans tall-tale about orbiting the sources of yourself and yearning for clarity in a broken world.;”
Nora Sharp’s Cosmic Docks, which premiered the weekend of March 13th, 2025 at The Dance Center at Columbia College Chicago, delves into the notion of how we come to know something integral about who we are and our relationship to the world around us…
Cosmic Docks is one part standup special, one part loop-pedal-karaoke, one part dance-with-an-uppercase “D.” Nora finds themselves in a dumpster, they tell us, in the alley behind Dr. Alison Shore’s Office (Andersonville’s premier top surgery clinician). In this story, Sharp is digging because Giselle (the receptionist) cryptically told them to. Fulfilling Giselle’s prophecy, they find a USB stick with a document titled 17 Alternative or Unexpected Indicators Slash Explicators of Queerness and or Transness. This USB port is where we leave our spaceship moored for a while…
In the opening scene of Cosmic Docks we see Sharp in the back corner of the stage, their arms and fingers stretched straight up in the air and they are jumping. They are bouncing up and down repeatedly, only the tips of their hands grazing a bright light, seemingly just out of and at the same time just within reach. It isn’t close enough for them to fully grasp it; yet now we are all looking at it. It becomes a portal to the same ways understanding can be elusive and also something we freely jump towards. It also becomes a platform, which reveals and reflects the other sources of light in the space, such as: the safety strip lining the stairs, the bright red EXIT signs, the mirroring of the track lights on the stage floor, Sharp’s metallic pants, and the echoes of the giant full moon that just happened to be in the sky over the lake that same night. This introductory moment is a glimpse into the multiple ways we come to knowledge—like the things in the corner of our eye or recesses of the subconscious.
Then (as is often a device found in Sharp’s performances), they almost immediately break the fourth wall; Sharp asks for the house lights to be brought up and thanks the audience for being with them on the journey of Cosmic Docks…
Image above: A still from Nora Sharp's performance of "Cosmic Docks" on March 12, 2025 at Chicago Solo Spotlight Festival, Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago. Sharp can be seen wearing a black tank top and blue reflective pants while posing confidently in front of a paragraph consisting of a flirty copypasta text message on a black background. Image by William Frederking.
