the company
“The love letter is to the black femmes that i get to work with, and to the femmes that started this form—people we hold up as giants. Making major helped me pay attention deeply and with a caring eye to what it means to forge black femme community.”
–Ogemdi Ude for Dance Magazine
Ogemdi Ude / Akunna Material is the project based company of choreographer and director Ogemdi Ude, producing original dance, theater, and installation works in which Black diasporic cultural forms meet an experimental contemporary vernacular. Their practice engages the fleshiness of Black femme and queer bodies in motion as sites for enlivening lost peoples and histories. At the root is understanding the necessity of journeying through grief, and how—in the midst of it—we attempt to make meaning from memory and show evidence of our relationship to the lost subject. Engaging a roster of world renowned performers, designers, and visual artists, Ogemdi Ude / Akunna Material empowers audiences and collaborators to reckon with the past, present, and futures of Black folks in collective motion.
the director
Ogemdi Ude is a dance and interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at Kampnagel, New York Live Arts, On the Boards, OZ Arts, the University of Southern California, The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Center for Performance Research, and for BAM’s DanceAfrica festival. As an educator, she has taught at Bates College, The New School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and University of the Arts. She is a 2026 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artist recipient, 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Choreography, 2025 Princess Grace Honoraria in Choreography, 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and a 2024 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient. She has been a 2024/2025 BAX Artist-in-Residence, 2024-2025 Leslie Lohman Artist Fellow, 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. She has published a book Watch Me in a collection edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.
MAJOR
MAJOR is a dance theater project exploring the physicality, history, sociopolitics, and interiority of majorette dance, a form that originated in the American South within Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the 1960s. These Black femme teams accompanied by marching bands created a movement style that requires master showmanship with allegiance to count, undulation, groove, and sensual yet strong performativity. In MAJOR, six Black femmes embrace majorette form – a fundamental relic of Black girlhood – to pursue the intimate journey of returning to bodies they thought lost. Experiments in improvised and verbatim language intertwine with a music score that integrates Southern rap, horns, drumlines, and melodic R&B and soul by Lambkin. The Chord Archive is showcased alongside performances, a physical and digital documentation of the creative process and personal historical accounts from former majorette dancers. A fierce investigation of physical memory, sexuality, sensuality, and community, MAJOR is a nuanced love letter to the folks who taught the team how to be proudly Black and proudly femme.
Stay tuned for updates on work in development.
Teamwork
A workshop inspired by MAJOR. In this workshop, participants will learn the foundations of majorette dance technique, a form begun by Southern Black femmes at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the 1950s. Alongside majorette dance, participants will learn methods for bridging the form with contemporary dance and improvisation. This high energy workshop will move from a warm up, to across the floor work, to choreography, to improvised scores, and end in composition practices. This is an opportunity to learn the importance of Black femme dance tradition, and reckon with your own dance histories.
Open to all levels but tailored to the intermediate/advanced Afro-diasporic forms or contemporary dancer.
Forget How to Dance
This class is a playful and provocative step into Ogemdi’s recurring dance nightmare: ‘I am put onstage with a dance company in front of hundreds of people, and everyone except me knows the choreography.’ Participants will draw from that fear and learn how to use forgetting to their advantage. Ogemdi will introduce improvised scores and memory games and choreographic tools that ask participants to make something out of their disjointed memories. They will also employ weight, tension, rebound, speed, and rigor. They will make complex choreographies from empty beginnings and find new ways to be brave in a scary field.
Remember the Time
This workshop is focused on memory, nostalgia, and straddling time. Participants will uncover dances from their pasts as opportunities for transformed dancing in their present. What choreographies and genres live within you that are dying to come out? By engaging their past selves, participants will explore individual and group dance making – learning and creating compositional methods and movement and language based improvised scores. This workshop is for those searching for ways to reinvent their present performing body. Ogemdi will ask participants to regard the paths they have already taken, but have perhaps forgotten. The way they danced at a party in high school, at their elementary school recital, in their first day of college dance class – these are all valuable. Their dancing pasts will liberate their dancing futures.
What to expect:
This workshop is open to all levels, but is best suited towards those with a history of movement experience. Participants will move through improvisation, composition exercises, and working with language. There will be some journaling and reading as well.
Talk Your Shit
Rant. Preach. Soliloquize. Say your piece.
In this workshop participants will explore how to incorporate dialogue authentically into dance practice. Language becomes as essential as movement as we work with games, interviews, and scores to imbue performance with the personal. In our dancing, participants will work with weight, levity, tension, and release to find physical rigor and approaches to improvisation that intertwine with vocal challenges. This is not an acting class. It’s an opportunity for participants to bring their holistic selves into performance and talk the shit they need to talk.
What to expect:
Participants will begin each class with movement improvisation tasks and games to warm up the body, before folding in language improvisation tasks and games. Ogemdi (or another facilitator from the company) will teach examples of bridging dialogue and dance through the lens of recent performance projects and will offer sample structures for students to try. Students will eventually create their own scores, games, and challenges to perform. They will stop throughout class for written reflection and to discuss our progress. People are encouraged to bring notebooks and pens.
