THE UNRULY BODY: PERFORMANCE, ENERGETIC TRANSMISSION, AND BECOMING UNDONE

Okwui Okpokwasili is a New York-based writer, performer, and choreographer. At GIDEST, she will discuss her attempts to excavate singular movement vocabularies that might confound and confirm ideas around performing in a black/brown body.

Okwui Okpokwasili’s work includes two Bessie Award-winning productions: Pent-Up: a Revenge Dance and Bronx Gothic (described by Hilton Als as "a tour de force on the order of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye"), as well as the site-specific works The Oval and When I Return, Who Will Receive Me? She is currently the Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist for her work Poor People’s TV Room. Okwui frequently collaborates with director/designer Peter Born and award-winning director Ralph Lemon, appearing in Come Home, Charley Patton (for which she won a Bessie Award), HYCS, and Scaffold Room. She has also worked with Nora Chipaumire, Julie Taymor, Young Jean Lee, Richard Foreman, and Richard Maxwell. Bronx Gothic, an acclaimed documentary movie, directed by Andrew Rossi, of her one-woman show, ran at Film Forum in 2017.