MASS MoCA Co-Presentation: Okwui Okpokwasili

Okwui Okpokwasili’s Poor People’s TV Room | April 7, 2018 at 8pm

Okwui Okpokwasili is praised as a “standout in New York’s crowded performance scene” (The New Yorker).

Created in collaboration with director and visual artist Peter Born, Okpokwasili’s Poor People’s TV Room looks at the intersection of history and women’s bodies, drawing from two incidents in Nigeria—the Women’s War of 1929 and the Boko Haram kidnappings, which sparked the Bring Back Our Girls movement. Looking backward and forward simultaneously, Poor People’s TV Room pulls audiences through an ancestral fever dream shared between four women, linked through time and fractured memories by a harrowing combination of text, movement, and sound.

About Okwui Okpokwasili

Okwui Okpokwasili is a New York-based writer, performer, and choreographer. In partnership with collaborator Peter Born, Okpokwasili creates multidisciplinary projects that are raw, intimate experiences. Their first New York production, Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance, premiered at Performance Space 122 and received a 2010 New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Award for Outstanding Production, and an immersive installation version was featured in the 2008 Prelude Festival. Their second collaboration, Bronx Gothic, won a 2014 New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Award for Outstanding Production and continues to tour nationally and internationally. In June of 2014, they presented an installation version entitled Bronx Gothic: The Oval as part of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s River to River Festival.

Okpokwasili‘s residencies and awards include The French American Cultural Exchange (2006-2007); Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Choreographic Fellowship (2012); Baryshnikov Arts Center Artist-inResidence (2013); New York Live Arts Studio Series (2013); Under Construction at the Park Avenue Armory (2013); New York Foundation for the Arts’ Fellowship in Choreography (2013); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Program (2014-15); The Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ artist grant in dance (2014); BRIClab (2015); Columbia University (2015); and the Rauschenberg Residency (2015).

The presentation of Poor People’s TV Room by Okwui Okpokwasili was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.