Renegade Performance Group will premiere a multimedia solo created by Artistic Director, André M. Zachery at the new 651ARTS Performance Center in October 2024 entitled - "Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends". This new project will be a live-performance, dance film, and community engagement series commissioned by 651ARTS. Project collaborators include Ayinde Jean-Baptiste (co-producer/dramaturg), Espii Proctor (sound designer), Mike David T. (filmmaker). "Against Gravity..." begins this journey from the period of his youth in Chicago in the 1980-90’s considering how his personal narrative intersects with three legendary figures: Fred Hampton, Ben (Benji) Wilson and Harold Washington. The work is guided in part by the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks whose texts chronicled the Black Chicago experience and the performance will explore Zachery’s experiences shouldering the weight of the wake of these three men --respectively a Black Panther revolutionary, a superstar athlete and a post-Civil Rights era politician. "Against Gravity..." is a chance to unpack how the expectations and pressures cast by these three men's lives, deaths and pursuant mythologies shaped the Black men, like Zachery, who came of age in the city that made them legends.