BAM To Present New York Premiere Of Okwui Okpokwasili And Peter Born's ADAKU, PART 1: THE ROAD OPENS

Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer, and writer Okwui Okpokwasili and director, visual artist, and sound designer Peter Born will present their new cross-disciplinary performance adaku, part 1: the road opens at BAM Fisher Fishman Space as part of BAM's 2023 Next Wave Festival, November 28–December 2 (Tuesday–Saturday), at 7:30pm.

Okpokwasili and Born carry a deep 20-year history of collaboration leading up to this new production, which has resulted in the creation of numerous acclaimed performance, installation, and film works. Working at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art, each of their highly experimental, formally inventive works offers an exacting artistic commitment to unearth nearly forgotten narratives, particularly those of Black women. In this process, they explore themes that historicize and memorialize the stories.

In this latest work, adaku, part 1: the road opens, the first 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.

 

Conceived and written by Okpokwasili, a 2018 recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, and directed in collaboration with Born, their approach to the original text, song, movement, and scenic design creates a visceral nonlinear narrative that unfolds within the past and present simultaneously, allowing the ghosts of history to haunt and inhabit our present. Okpokwasili's extraordinary storytelling builds a catalytic, animating connection with her reverberating performance, and, along with an eminent cast of six women, each with their own distinctive performance presence, adaku, part 1 aims to cultivate a shared engagement with the audience that opens up spaces of imaginative possibility.

adaku, part 1: the road opens is written by Okwui Okpokwasili and co-directed with Peter Born. Original songs by Okwui Okpokwasili. Sound score by Peter Born. Movement developed by Okpokwasili and Born in collaboration with the performers. Set, lighting, and video design by Peter Born. Sound design by Will Johnson and Peter Born. Costume co-design and fabrication by James Gibbel. Dramaturgy by Katherine Profeta. Musical direction by Deah Love Harriott. Performed by mayfield brooks, McKenzie Frye, Audrey Hailes, Samita Sinha, Stacey Lynn Smith, AJ Wilmore, and Okwui Okpokwasili.

adaku, part 1: the road opens was commissioned by BAM for the 2023 Next Wave Festival and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. The work was developed in residency at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the Hyundai Card Performance Series, 2023 Summer Stages Dance @ ICA/Boston, Brown Arts Institute at Brown University, and the Mercury Store. Additional support was provided by the Mellon Foundation and New England Foundation for the Arts.

The performance will take place at BAM Fisher Fishman Space, 321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY. Tickets start at $35, and are available at https://www.bam.org/adaku.

Okwui Okpokwasili

(she/her) is a performing artist, 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 the Bessie Award-winning pent-up: a revenge dance, the Bessie Award-winning Bronx Gothic, as well as poor people's room, when I return who will receive me, Adaku's Revolt, and the participatory performance installation Sitting on a Man's Head. Recent works include installations in the exhibitions Grief and Grievance, Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum, Witchhunt at the Hammer Museum, and Sex Ecologies at Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway. Her work has been presented at such venues as the Walker Art Center, Performance Space New York, Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, ICA Boston, MCA Chicago, and New York Live Arts. Recent commissions include the performance On the way, undone at the High Line in New York City and at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn as part of FIAF's Crossing the Line Festival, the film Returning for Danspace Project, and the site-specific performance Swallow the Moon at Jacob's Pillow.

Okpokwasili is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. She was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA in 2022 and an artist in residence at the Brown Arts Institute in 2023.

Okpokwasili has worked with film and theater directors Carrie Mae Weems, Ralph Lemon, Arthur Jafa, Terence Nance, Josephine Decker, Mika Rottenberg, Mahyad Tousi, Charlotte Brathwaite, Jim Findlay, Annie Dorsen, and Peter Born.

Peter Born (he/him) works as a director, composer, and designer of performance and installation, often in collaboration with Okwui Okpokwasili. Their performance and installation work has appeared internationally at the Berlin Biennale, the Wiener Festwochen, and Tate Museum in London. He has collaborated with David Thomson as a director, designer, and writer on The Venus Knot (2017) and he his own mythical beast (2018), and as a set designer for Nora Chipaumire's rite/riot (2014) and El Capitan Kinglady (2016). Four of Born's collaborations have garnered New York Dance and 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 Estée Lauder, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

For more information about Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, visit www.sweatvariant.com.

About BAM Next Wave Festival

A world-class home for adventurous artists, audiences, and ideas, BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) is North America's oldest performing arts center, showcasing the work of emerging artists and modern icons. It is led by President, Gina Duncan.

For more than 160 years, BAM has been a thriving, urban multi-arts complex renowned for presenting an unparalleled roster of visionary and cutting-edge dance, theater, music, opera, visual arts, literature, and film engagements. Attracting more than 750,000 people annually to its home in Brooklyn, BAM provides a welcoming cultural stage and meeting place for global and local communities of all backgrounds. BAM's distinctive multi-theater campus is alive year-round with inspired new engagements and signature programs alike including the renowned Next Wave (one of the world's most influential festivals of contemporary performing arts, founded in 1983), the iconic DanceAfrica, an acclaimed repertory film program, and literary, archival, educational and humanities programs. For more information visit BAM.org.

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