New York loves artists on the brink … of greatness or titillating scandal, not obscurity or the abyss. So for its multidisciplinary series Open Call, The Shed chooses “early-career” artists who have already garnered enough attention and awards that they are not likely to instantly fade out. For August, actor-dancer Nile Harris, recent subject of a glowing New York Times profile, presents minor b, “a choreographed event, a symphony of low vibrations”that uses the biography of jazz cornetist and longtime insane asylum inmate Buddy Bolden to ruminate about “a minor black behavior that refuses capitalization and respectability” (August 9 and 10). In How to Bend Down/How to Pick it Up (August 15 to 17), Bessie-award-winner Kayla Hamilton “explores lineages of Black disabled imagination” via the cotton field, the Black church, and the freakshow, which she reconfigures in an act of “alternative world-building.” Open Call performances are free but require tickets, available from July 18. —Apollinaire Scherr