Acclaimed Multidisciplinary Performance POOR PEOPLE'S TV ROOM Opens 2/8

REDCAT, CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, presents the Los Angeles premiere of Poor People's TV Room, the newest work by Bessie Award-winning choreographer/artist Okwui Okpokwasili, Thursday February 8 to Sunday February 11, 2018.

Known for her intensely powerful performances, Bessie Award-winning Okwui Okpokwasili (featured at REDCAT in Ralph Lemon's How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere) considers the collective amnesia around the Nigerian women's resistance movements of the past century. With collaborator Peter Born, she mixes ritualistic and hallucinogenic movement, song, video, and text, creating a dystopian narrative in which characters slip through the fissures of time to wander in a bush of ghosts.

Poor People's TV Room was selected by Artforum as one of the Best Works of 2017. Inspired in part by the Women's War of 1929 in Nigeria, the work weaves together movement, text, song, and video in a visceral performance that explores the collectivity of women and issues of gender, culture, and identity as they are expressed in both American and global contexts.

The Women's War of 1929 is sometimes referred to as the "Women's Egwu" (meaning dance or performance), and Poor People's TV Room draws inspiration from the use of the body in political and protest practices. The TV room referenced in the work's title is a space where history is excavated by the body-even after the mind has lost its ability to remember. It is a place of resistance and response to the disappearance of black women in cultural narratives, especially as empowered agents of their own change.

Performed by Okpokwasili with Thuli Dumakude, Katrina Reid, and Nehemoyia Young, Poor People's TV Room is a speculative, impressionistic work that is grounded in a narrative of the bodies of brown women. Okpokwasili and Born use duration to reorganize the temporal space, allowing the work to be anchored and shaped out of the energetically charged and unflinchingly corporeal relationship of the performers to each other and to the audience. Collectively, they generate a multilayered performance that plays in a discursive space concerned with the entanglement of visibility and shared embodiment, with the spectral and insistent presence of forgotten women.

"It is a kind of rumination on absence-how particular forms of mediation, particular ways of looking and framing in attempting to create visibility, may hasten invisibility," says Okpokwasili. "I'm thinking of the 'Bring Back Our Girls Movement' and the meme culture. I'm thinking about attempts to recover seminal historical moments from the margins, and what to recover. I am also considering Nollywood and cultural creation and projection, popular mythmaking."

In Okpokwasili's inquiry into the Women's War of 1929 she discovered the empowered role of women as stewards of the precolonial marketplace and how the colonial project sought to supplant women in the market with men. The current spate of suicide bombings in Northern Nigerian markets, often carried out by young women violently coerced or radicalized by Boko Haram, presents a twisted and violent irony where young women are visible not as caretakers of the market but as an existential threat.Poor People's TV Room premiered at the American Dance Institute (Rockville, MD) in November 2016, followed by performances at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), EMPAC (Rensselaer, NY), and New York Live Arts (New York City).

Presented in association with CAP UCLA. Co-presented with Showbox LA, who presented Oukwui's solo Bronx Gothic in 2014.

The presentation of Poor People's TV Room 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.

Additional funds were provided by The Surdna Foundation in support of CAP UCLA's CODA21 initiative.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Okwui Okpokwasili is a New York-based writer, performer, and choreographer. In partnership with collaborator Peter Born, Okpokwasili creates cross-disciplinary performance projects. Their first New York production, Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance, premiered at Performance Space 122 and received a 2010 NY Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award for Outstanding Production. An immersive installation version of Pent-Up was featured in the 2008 Prelude Festival. Their second collaboration, Bronx Gothic, won a 2014 NY Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award for Outstanding Production, toured nationally and internationally, and is the subject of a new documentary film, directed by Andrew Rossi. Site-specific performance installations include Bronx Gothic: The Oval at the 2014 River to River Festival, When I Return Who Will Receive Me? at the 2016 River to River Festival, and Poor People's TV Room solo at Lincoln Center in the David Rubinstein Atrium in June 2014.

Okpokwasili frequently collaborates with award-winning director Ralph Lemon, including on How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? (seen at REDCAT in 2010), Come home Charley Patton (for which she also won a Bessie Award); a duet performed at the Museum of Modern Art as part of On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century; and, most recently, Lemon's Scaffold Room. She has also worked with Nora Chipaumire, Julie Taymor, Young Jean Lee, Annie Dorsen, Richard Foreman, and Richard Maxwell.

Okpokwasili's residencies and awards include The French American Cultural Exchange (2006- 2007); the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Choreographic Fellowship (2012, 2016); Baryshnikov Arts Center Artist-in-Residence (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); Danspace Project (2013, 2014); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Extended Life Program (2014-2015); The Foundation for Contemporary Arts' Dance grantee (2014); BRIClab (2015); Wesleyan ICPP Artist in Residency; Artist in Residence at the Harkness Dance Center at the 92nd Street Y; 2016 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's President's Award for the Performing Arts; Columbia University (2015); and the Rauschenberg Residency (2015). Okpokwasili was the 2015-2017 Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist. Her work has been supported by Creative Capital, the MAP Fund, and New England Foundation for the Arts.

Peter Born is a director, designer, and filmmaker. In addition to his work with Okpokwasili, he is currently collaborating with David Thomson on a cycle of installation/performances revolving around a post-sexual incarnation of Venus, happening throughout 2015-2017. He created the set for Nora Chipaumire's rite/riot, and he has created performance videos with Chipaumire, including the upcoming El Capitan Kinglady. He works as an art director and prop stylist for video and photo projects with such clients as Vogue, Este?e Lauder, Barney's Co-op, Bloomingdale's, Old Navy, 25 Magazine, Northrup Grumman, and The Wall Street Journal, with collaborators including Kanye West, Barnaby Roper, Santiago and Mauricio Sierra, Quentin Jones, and NoStringsUS Puppet Productions. He is a former New York public high school teacher, an itinerant floral designer, corporate actor-facilitator, and furniture designer. His collaborations with Okwui Okpokwasili have garnered two NY Dance and Performance "Bessie" Awards.

Poor People's TV Room was produced by MAPP International Productions.

Poor People's TV Room was commissioned by New York Live Arts Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA) program, with major support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Slobodan Randjelovic & Jon Stryker. Additional commissioning was provided by the American Dance Institute and the Walker Art Center.

Poor People's TV Room is a project of Creative Capital. The work has received funding from the MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It 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, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support was also received from the Ken and Judith Joy Family Foundation. The development of the work was supported by residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University in Tallahassee; Brooklyn Creative Arts LAB (BRIC); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; Denniston Hill Residency; Times Square Alliance Artists in Residence; "Alternative Spring Break: NYC Performing Arts" at Columbia University; the 92nd Street Y in New York; the Rauschenberg Residency (Robert Rauschenberg Foundation) on Captiva Island, FL; and Wesleyan University in Middlebury, CT.

The upcoming tour schedule is below.

Tour Schedule for Poor People's TV Room: February-May 2018
February 8-11: REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA) / Presented in association with CAP UCLA
February 22-24: Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr, PA)
March 9-10: Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA)
April 7: MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA) / Presented in association with Jacob's Pillow April 12-15: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL)
May 11-12: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA)

Tickets and info at https://www.redcat.org/event/okwui-okpokwasili

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