Research & Reading List: Okwui Okpokwasili, Body Power
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Season 1, Episode 114: Okwui Okpokwasili on Centering Black Women's Experiences in Performance
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Description: Can dance and song offer insight into a person’s experience, and provoke curiosity, even empathy across national identity, race and gender? In this episode, Laura interviews MacArthur Genius Award-winning choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili about her groundbreaking experimental work to communicate the lived experiences of African and African American women through movement. Okpokwasili explains how she uses pain, action, gesture, and character-play to bypass audiences' preconceived notions and bring visibility to identities rendered invisible by mainstream culture and Laura stumps her with her own question: what do you carry and how does that carry you?
Guest: Okwui Okpokwasili- Choreographer, performer and MacArthur Fellow. Read More
Related Laura Flanders Show Episodes:
• Showing Up for Racial Justice and Arts Activism at the US-MX Border
• Disability Arts, Disability Justice
• Dance as World-Changing Movement: Alice Sheppard and STREB
• What Is A Risky Change? Kimberle Crenshaw & Eve Ensler
Related Articles and Resources:
• Okwui Okpokwasili Makes Room For Restitution in ‘Sitting on a man's HEAD’ by Britt Stigler, All Arts
• Lesson of the Day: ‘A Battle for the Souls of Black Girls’ by Erica L. Green, Mark Walker and Eliza Shapiro, New York Times
• A Performance Artist Testing the Limits of Her Own Endurance by Antwaun Sargent, New York Times Style Magazine
• ‘Swirling in this stew’: Making art with MacArthur-winning alumna Okwui Okpokwasili, by Brita Belli, New York Times
Music in the Middle Featured in the Podcast:
“Sam’s Song” from Okwui Okpokwasili’s debut album Day Pulls Down the Sky courtesy of the artist. Read More
