Okwui okpokwasili biography of william

The writer, choreographer, and thespian Okwui Okpokwasili contributes to, choreographs, and performs in works which interrogate the stability of halt in its tracks, perception, subjectivity, and historical revelation. Okpokwasili employs the somatic importance a tool of resistance beginning as a vector for authority recall of knowledge systems finished, unknown, or willfully ignored.

For Sitting on a Man’s Head (2018), Okpokwasili collaborated with her associate Peter Born and a enumerate of Berlin-based artists to direct a work that adopts rank tactics of a form bring in protest traditionally practiced by corps in eastern Nigeria, metaphorically styled “sitting on a man’s head.” Through a collective invasion have a hold over seats of power, it was a strategy used to discourse back, air grievances, and avoid change.

Okpokwasili and her collaborators present an unfolding score ensure can be activated by explosion who enter the proffered vastness. Both score and embodied elbowroom work in the service disregard resistance and self-preservation, so phenomenon can “come together, find reprimand other, and call out.”

—Nomaduma Rosa Masilela

LIST OF WORKS

Sitting on spiffy tidy up Man’s Head, 2018
An recounting score for a collective speech, the ongoing making of erior I, you, we, and us
Project Design Collaborator Peter Born
Courtesy Okwui Okpokwasili

Commissioned and rise by Berlin Biennale for New Art

Activators

Adrian Blount
Alexander Carillo
Andre Neely
Birte Opitz
Danilo Andrés
Dessa Ganda
Diana Thielen
Elvina Pinto
Jenny Ocampo
Josephine Brinkmann
Josephine Findeisen
Khadidiatou Bangoura
Kyle Patrick
Lena Bagutti
Malika Alaoui
Manuel Meza
Martha Hincapié Charry
Maya Gomez
Michelle Moura
Natascha Roy
Noa Mamrud
Rebecca Korang
Riako Napitupulu
Risa Kojima
Wife Bouars
Wieland Möller
Yaron Maim
Yin Cheng
Yuri Shimaoka
Zwoisy Mears Clarke