SWEAT VARIANT | OKWUI OKPOKWASILI & PETER BORN

Sweat Variant | adaku part 1: the road opens | PC: Lauren Miller

the company

“elastic and electric, luxuriantly rippling, poetically arranged with moments of perfect stillness that arrive amid splashes of expression.”
–Dance Magazine

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.

View the Press Kit | Company Website

Artistic Director_OO_headshot_crMichaelAvedon

the directorS

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.

Artistic Director_PB_headshot_crPeterBorn

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.

adaku, part 1: the road opens

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.

Bronx Gothic

Bronx Gothic is a fictive autobiographical invocation of the minds and bodies of two 6th-grade girls on the verge of adolescence in the mid-1980s. Drawing inspiration from Victorian-era novels and West African griot storytellers, Okpokwasili gives vivid physical force to the girls’ charged relationship, revealed with unflinching honesty through their sex-saturated hand-passed notes. As memories surge with a potency that threatens to break the body, Bronx Gothic conjures a darkly powerful tale of sexual discovery and intimate entwinings in the outer boroughs of New York City. Through a combination of movement, songs and written correspondence, Bronx Gothic deals with the universal experience of a body in transformation. How do any of us contend with the multiple conditions that are always present in one body?

Bronx Gothic plays out in the rough terrain of memory.
It is not an autobiography. But it is my story.
It is an homage and a cry.
– Okwui Okpokwasili

And when we speak we are afraid
Our words will not be heard
Nor welcomed
But when we are silent we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
Remembering
We were never meant to survive
– Litany for Survival, Audre Lorde

Classroom Visit

With University Presenters, members of the company may be able to attend a University class that fits into the themes or form of the work to discuss the work more intently. Classes details should be communicated with the company in advance to approve conversation and schedule.

MASTERCLASS/WORKSHOP

Members of the company and creative team can offer a nuanced workshop based on their expertise. Contemporary dance, design and technical workshops are available. Each workshop will be roughly 90 minutes.

Open rehearsal

Company will work with the presenter to engage members of the community and/ or students to engage in part of the technical rehearsal process and witness the work in the build up to opening night. The director or other members of the creative team may be able to answer questions at the end of the rehearsal. Ideal time, 45 minutes-1 hour.

POST- SHOW Q AND A

Members of the creative team will engage with the audience directly after the performance to answer questions and open up the creative process. The conversation should be moderated by a member of the community that the presenter engages. The moderator should be provided some information about the company and performance in advance of the conversation and be requested to watch the performance.