Looking for the weather inside
A conversation with Okwui Okpokwasili
Katrina Reid and Okwui Okpokwasili in a performance of Poor People’s TV Room at NYLive Arts in 2017. Credit: MG
By Gaby Gordon-Fox ’22
Okwui Okpokwasili. Credit: Peter Born
The Marion Boulton Stroud Foundation, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, its Art Advisory Committee, and arts faculty at the College of the Atlantic, selected writer, performer, and choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili as the 2021 Kippy Stroud COA Artist in Residence. Okpokwasili was joined by her partner and collaborator, Peter Born, and their daughter, Umechi, for a month-long residency early last fall. While she was here, I got the chance to talk with her and attend the participatory outdoor event she held on campus.
As Okpokwasili and I were walking towards a shaded bench overlooking the ocean, I was trying to explain what an amazing opportunity this was for me. I had studied her performance work in several classes with Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman Chair in Performing Arts Jodi Baker, and the complexity of Okpokwasili’s work—especially in terms of sound/score, text, comedy, and movement—has been hugely influential in my own developing practice. The list of topics I wanted to cover was endless, but I was also very nervous. All of that lifted though as soon as we sat down. She caught me at my use of the word “amazing.” She noted that it’s a sensationalizing word. It indicates some heightened sense of feeling, as if it’s something that we should all strive for. But what does it actually mean to feel amazing? Or be in a state of amazement? I appreciated this note… What I really wanted to say was that I had been looking forward to this opportunity in all of the messy, nervous, and euphoric ways possible.
During her time at COA, Okpokwasili worked almost exclusively in the Blum Gallery; she opened up the big Dutch doors to let in fresh air and autumn light. In this dedicated space, she and Born experimented with sound, score, image, and movement for an upcoming piece. Okpokwasili spoke candidly about the need for a private space to create and explore her own sound. This intimate practice of letting out noise is not one she is keen on having interrupted, even though COA campus residents are certainly not strangers to stumbling upon spontaneous performance, sound, and music work being developed in the oak trees or the tidal zone. After a chaotic few years, Okpokwasili admitted that the calming nature of the COA landscape helped her realize that her mind was not at peace. She was struck by the beauty and vulnerability of this geography. “It gives you a reminder that your pores are open. No matter what agenda you arrive with, there is strength in adaptability and the ability to be open to change.” This is a useful reminder for all of us but maybe especially for performing artists in the context of the pandemic. For practices that require proximity—living, breathing bodies together in a room—masking and social distancing disrupt the work on the most basic level.
For the past three years, Okpokwasili has been developing participatory performance pieces that involve generating sound and very slow, shared movement; she calls these pieces Sitting on a Man’s Head. In collaboration with Born, she adapted the slow walk from a pre-colonial collective practice that Southeastern Nigerian women performed to publicly shame powerful men and demand redress of grievances during the Women’s War of 1929—this practice was called “Sitting on a Man.” The womens’ means of protest involved creating an improvisational dance and chorus to disrupt the status quo, and force colonizers to hear and address their concerns. When presenting Sitting on a Man’s Head, Okpokwasili brings community members and local artists together to create the piece. Born designs the sonic foundation for these walks that ground the work and propel the group forward. During the walk, Okpokwasili invites participants to vocalize in any way they’d like: singing, harmonizing, talking, moaning, crying—offering spontaneous prompts and suggestions as the work unfolds. Before participants enter the space, they are invited to answer the question, “What do you carry, and how in turn does that carry you?” The answers to this question become part of what is spoken, sung, and shared during the slow walk. Okpokwasili describes her slow walking practice as simply “… being in some kind of connection with each other. It invites you to think about how to generate, in a generous way. There is a recognition that you are trying to be in touch and in connection with your own impulses, but also having an awareness of others around you.” The practice changes significantly depending on who is taking part, where it is located, and what is going on in the world at the time. There is an encounter with difference that emerges through each iteration, as all the elements of the piece meet and generate with each other.
In connection to this discussion about the significance of shared movement, of being moved, Okpokwasili contrasts her work process with what’s experienced in more conventional theater institutions, where directors often say the blocking of the show is “locked” before opening. “I’m like, how do you lock a show? What do you mean lock? Does someone have a key? Are we all in a box? I’m just like, God help us if anything is locked. You don’t lock your knees. You don’t lock anything if you want to keep going and have life and juice.” She highlights that the power of any piece lies in its ability to affect and be affected in each iteration, by the choices of the performers and the presence of an audience. According to Okpokwasili, “performances are not locked because we are alive, we are not dead.”
A still photo from the practice Sitting On A Man’s Head at New York at Danspace Project as part of the Platform “Utterances from the Chorus.” Credit: Tony Turner
She has shared various iterations of Sitting on a Man’s Head, working with hundreds of artists worldwide. From the Berlin Biennale in 2018, to the Countercurrent festival in Houston Texas in 2019, and to Danspace in New York City in March 2020. She planned to share it at the Tate Modern in London in March 2020 but this had to be canceled when in-person events became impossible due to the pandemic.
In November 2020, after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the US presidential election, Okpokwasili and Born created a socially-distanced slow walk at the Culture Mill Lab in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. There was an overwhelming feeling of change in the air because of the imminent shift ahead. “It was our first time going out and being with people. Your feet, your body, you’re just vibrating. And then to be with folks to ask these questions and to try to be in that space of all that you carry; you’re just thinking about everything you’ve been carrying, and that we’re all also carrying together. Yeah. I was weeping.” This walk was something new. Okpokwasili and Born also try to get their young daughter, Umechi, to take part in the practice on any given day by saying, “The last one to get to that pole wins” when walking along the busy streets of New York.
For Okpokwasili, the “slow walk” is at the core of her work, a thing she returns to again and again. Amidst the business of constant building and touring, “Sometimes it’s like, oh, let’s strip away. You have all this stuff and then you start to strip. That’s why sometimes the walk to me is so clear. It has been something of a teacher on how to work with and recognize difference. When I’m making my work, I have to wonder, how do I embrace things that aren’t necessarily clear or super legible, but that feel like: yes, right. You have to open yourself up to feeling different ways as you move through it. And then it’s like, how do I not be afraid, now that I feel differently about it? Is this the difference? Can I live with this difference? Is this the right difference? Whether you’ve been working on a show for years or you’ve just started developing it, when you move with difference, it can be scary.” For Okpokwasili, this openness is especially important when inviting others into her practice. “Hopefully the fear of discovering something unexpected, something that could change the piece entirely, well, that’s the beautiful thing. The thing that may make you take pause, but does not stop you from keeping on going.”
Okpokwasili began thinking about movement in college. After she graduated, she started working with a New York-based performance group who had just returned from Japan. They introduced her to aspects of Min Tanaka’s Body Weather movement ethos and practice. About three years later she traveled to the Body Weather Laboratory (BWL) in Japan. Working in this rural farm landscape altered Okpokwasili’s understanding of sensation. She spoke about this setting as a space for exploring movement in nature, “working in landscapes, doing duets in streams, and climbing trees. It was really a practice of finding the weather of the body on the land, within the land, with the land. That practice was deeply influential to me in the way that I thought about sensation. I was never necessarily interested in, oh, here’s my feeling and here’s how I project exactly what I’m feeling to the people watching. Why do you want to hold on to one feeling and be only invested in transmitting that one thing? You could be going through multiple feelings and thus creating some spaciousness.” Working at the BWL awakened her inclination to articulate feeling through interaction, creating space in the body to move through multiple sensations and images to create a kind of “weather” in the body. Seeing Min Tanaka perform at PS 122 (now Performance Space New York) had a huge impact on Okpokwasili. “In a way it was like I was learning how to be there with him… Watching Min, my body felt like it was changing in line with his body… I felt the way time moved was changing… It made me feel free.” Hearing her talk about this kind of connection to another’s work was reassuring for me. I understand it on a profound level. Okpokwasili’s work affects me in much the same way.
Okpokwasili performing Bronx Gothic at Danspace Project as part of PS 122’s (Now Performance Space New York) COIL festival in 2014. Credit: Ian Douglas
Okpokwasili complicates the role of spectator and performer. “When encountering somebody in an audience or someone watching, you couldn’t necessarily be sure that they understood the particular weather that was forming in your body. But at least they knew that something was happening. They could see it happening, and there was room for their feeling… It opens up the possibility for a meeting space of two mysterious weathers.” She notes that duration is a significant part of the practice “it gives people the choice. I’m gonna stay in this one thing and it’s gonna degrade in its own time. And you, person, wherever you have been at some point, you’ll choose to be where I am with me and we’ll be together. Or you won’t, or you’ll choose something different. But I’m trying to make a path for you to make a choice.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s often felt like we have little room for choice. Necessary adjustments for safety have presented unique and sometimes overwhelming problems for performance work and study. I tell Okpokwasili how COA has adapted, and she is amused and impressed, especially with how Baker managed to teach Tadashi Suzuki’s Physical Training Principles in an online format. With a warm smile she takes a second—the warblers are chirping—and she says, “One of the good things that may have come out of this pandemic is that maybe we’re all a bit weirder, more porous. We had to let go of certainty. And we have to be open to imagining other ways of doing things.”
