- This event has passed.
OUTreach: Okwui Okpokwasili
June 24, 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born present adaku, part 1: the road opens .
adaku, part 1: the road opens premiered at ICA Boston and was subsequently staged at REDCAT and BAM in 2023. In this chapter of a larger speculative mythology, a precolonial African village is at the cusp of a major upheaval. The community is entangled in an argument that could shape the future of all of their lives. This collective reckoning explores the fraught relationship between ancestors, future generations, and the role of ritual. A sonic and visual landscape of reflective textures, contouring shadows, and thrumming facilitates an intimate exchange between performers and the audience.
Join us for Mentoring Artist-in-Residence colloquium series featuring leading artists presenting their studio practice, work process and notable works. Mature content. This event is free and open to the public. ADA accessible.
Bios
Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in much of her work. Her highly experimental productions include “Bessie” Award-winning pent-up: a revenge dance, “Bessie” Award-winning Bronx Gothic, as well as poor people’s TV room, poor people’s TV room (SOLO), when I return who will receive me, Adaku’s revolt, and the participatory performance installation Sitting on a Man’s Head. In 2022, she was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award in Dance, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship.
Peter Born (he/him) works as a director, composer and designer of performance and installation, often in collaboration with Okwui Okpokwasili. Their work has appeared internationally at the Berlin Biennale, the Wiener Festwochen, and the Tate. He collaborated with David Thomson as a director, designer and writer on The Venus Knot (2017), he his own mythical beast (2018), and VESSEL (2022). As a set designer, he collaborated with Nora Chipaumire on rite/riot (2014) and El Capitan Kinglady (2016). Four of Peter’s collaborations have garnered New York Dance Performance “Bessie” Awards. His work poor people’s TV room solo installation, created in collaboration with Okwui Okpokwasili, is in the collections of the Hammer Museum and the Whitney Museum. His work as an art director and prop stylist has been featured in video and photo projects with Vogue, Estee Lauder, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
Sweat Variant describes the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. We are partners in our work and our lives. Since 1996, we have been working at the intersection of dance, theater and visual art to make challenging and rigorous work that explores the many meanings entangled in the bodies of Black women. We are interested in building a spectacle of radical intimacy, where both performers and audience are acknowledged as being locked in a mutual gaze. We build gestural vocabularies and narrative frameworks that are concerned with the problem of memory in the inherent instability of the construction of a persona. We hope to activate a space that allows the audience to question who they are looking at and how they are looking. We hope this creates a critical space of wonderment, of uncertainty and of mystery. It is in this space that we believe we can see each other anew.