Slow Down and Walk: A Conversation

Okwui Okpokwasili

Nadine George-Graves

DANCE, INTERVIEWS, PERFORMANCE  |  $12 $10.80

December 2020
Read an excerpt

Okwui Okpokwasili: I think community is not even just about people who are next to you, but it’s just about people who pop up in your heart. People that you remember. People that maybe you’re not next to all of the time, but they reside in you. 

NGG: it feels like that’s also the answer to that question about fighting despair during this time.

OO: Yes. But also, sometimes also giving into despair, you know? I mean, don’t jump off of a roof. Because that does nothing, right? Except end everything and end all possibility of moving out of this darkness and using it as a lesson.

NGG: Acknowledge the trauma. This is traumatizing. The whole world is traumatized. And we have to acknowledge that and sit in it. Right? We’re always like, “Keep teaching, keep learning, keep researching it.” Or not. Or just chill out and be patient, and wait for the scientists to get it right. 

OO: That’s right. Exactly. We’re acknowledging the trauma of also how we built this country.  What is this country? This time… like, maybe COVID is a gift—it’s given us this… Okay, sit here with all of this death, sit here with all of the ways in which we don’t take care of each other. Do we have an opportunity to start taking care of each other? It’s like people who don’t worry about being innocent, don’t worry about… Just encounter all of the things that are dark, that hurt. Sit with them, move through them. Let them be your teachers, right?

In a conversation that took place in August 2020, during a global pandemic and in the wake of mass uprisings across the US against systemic racism and police brutality, scholar and choreographer Nadine George-Graves and performance-maker and dancer Okwui Okpokwasili discuss ideas of collaborative practice, radical forgiveness, virtuosity, and community. Reflecting on Okpokwasili’s and Peter Born’s practice and installation from March 2020, Sitting on a Man’s Head, the two women consider how art making reflects the kind of imagination of how one might live in the world, proposing modes of relation that are neither predatory nor transactional, but grounded in care.

This conversation originally took part as an event for 50WomenAtYale150, and was co-sponsored by Yale Women, the Yale Alumni Association, and the Yale Black Alumni Association.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral. To view a full list of pamphlets, click here.

About the Authors

Okwui Okpokwasili is a performer, choreographer, and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces that draw viewers into the interior lives of women of color, particularly those of African and African American women, whose stories have long been overlooked and rendered invisible. Her formally experimental productions include Bronx Gothic, Adaku’s Revolt, Poor People’s TV Room, and Sitting on a Man’s Head, and bring together elements of dance, theater, and the visual arts (with spare and distinctive sets designed by her husband and collaborator, Peter Born). She has held residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Rauschenberg Foundation Captiva Residency, and New York Live Arts, where she was a Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist. She has been awarded several Bessie Awards and was a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

Nadine George-Graves’s work is situated at the intersections of African American studies, critical gender studies, performance studies, theatre history, and dance history. She is the author of The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900-1940 (Palgrave Macmillan) and Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of Dance Theater, Community Engagement and Working it Out (University of Wisconsin Press) and has written on primitivity, ragtime dance, tap dance legend Jeni LeGon, identity politics and performance, competition, social change, early African American theatre, and the future of performance in the academy. In addition to her academic work, George-Graves is also an artist, and her creative work is part and parcel of her research. She is an adapter, director, and dance theatre maker. Her recent creative projects include Architectura, a dance theatre piece about the ways we build our lives; Suzan-Lori Parks’ Fucking A and Topdog/Underdog; Anansi, the Story King, an original adaptation of Anansi stories using college students, professionals, and 4th graders; and Sugar, a digital humanities project at the nexus of creativity and scholarship.

Praise

Reading this wonderful conversation between Okwui Okwpokwasili and Nadine George-Graves reminds me of the importance of radical forgiveness and acceptance; about the possibilities of the chorus and whether this body is capable of uttering and committing to others. I had the honor of being part of a collective body of practitioners holding and making space for each other through conversation, collaborative writing, slowness, proximity, and vocality in the durational practice Sitting on a Man’s Head, envisioned by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born and rooted in bringing visibility to the erasure that oppressive systems exercise, as well as their defiance. The work relates to Okwui’s research on embodied protest practices of Nigerian women. These performance actions gave way to access the continuum of blood memory. How close can we be to strangers and how much time is needed in that closeness, for the boundaries between bodies to become blurred? What do you carry, and in turn, what carries you? Sitting on a Man’s Head existed as a place to endure and care together, to grow close with each other in chant, intimacy, and vulnerability, to surrender exhausted in trust, elation, and joy.

Jean Carla Rodea

Reading this conversation between Nadine and Okwui is like eavesdropping on an intimate and animated conversation between brilliant friends.

Judy Hussie-Taylor

A radical intimacy and negotiation of Black/womanhood in an age of alienation.

Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto


Praise for Previous Work

To see her in person is to be almost blown backwards, like a sharp wind taking your breath away… Watching Okpokwasili’s piece, I felt voyeuristic, alone, and somewhat afraid.

Emma Wiseman, Hyperallergic

Okwui Okpokwasili is the kind of artist that brings such captivating energy to the stage that you might not even notice your mind being blown.

Park Avenue Armory

In the News

Links

Slow Down and Walk with Okwui Okpokwasili

Sitting on a Man’s Head on Danspace Project

“Okwui Okpokwasili Wants You to Slow Down and Walk With Her” in the New York Times

“An Artist Who Blurs Bodies and Genres in Protest” in the New York Times

“Okwui Okpokwasili Explores Politics and the Body” in the New Yorker

“Performance Is Not Benign,” a speech by Nadine George-Graves

Website of Nadine George-Graves

ALTOSTRATUS: AN ALLEGORY in collaboration with Peter Born

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-53-4
Pamphlet
36 pp, 5 x 8 in
Publication Date: December 15 2020
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Inpress Books (UK)
Series: 2020 Pamphlet Series