Okwui Okpokwasili

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.

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).

day pulls down the sky is the title of Okpokwasili’s first (and simultaneously released) LP initiated by Danspace Project’s executive director and chief curator Judy Hussie-Taylor who brought the idea of a recording to Okwui during one of their meetings about Danspace’s Platform 2020 and research institute. These songs were written by Okwui between 2012 and 2018, some specifically for her interdisciplinary performances. Four of the songs were first performed by Okwui at Danspace Project, including “sam’s song” on the occasion of Sam Miller’s memorial on September 15, 2018.

Sex Ecologies explores pleasure, affect, and the powers of the erotic in the human and more-than-human worlds. Arguing for the positive and constructive role of sex in ecology and art practice, these texts and artistic research projects attempt nothing short of reclaiming the sexual from Western erotophobia and heteronormative narratives of nature and reproduction. The artists and writers set out to examine queer ecology through the lens of environmental humanities, investigating the fluid boundaries between bodies (both human and nonhuman), between binary conceptions of nature as separate from culture, and between disciplines.

In newly commissioned texts from such writers as Mel Y. Chen and Jack Halberstam and a selection of influential essays—including an annotated version of Audre Lorde's “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”—as well as images and sketches from works in progress by a diverse group of artists, Sex Ecologiescombines insights from the fields of art, environmental humanities, ecofeminism, gender studies, science, technology, political science, and indigenous studies.

Sex Ecologies, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Kunsthall Trondheim, emerges from an arts-driven research project collaboratively developed between the art center and the Seed Box environmental humanities collaboratory. Conceived not as a result but as a seed arising from this transdisciplinary fertilization, the volume presents a case for the role of sex in environmental and social justice.

Contributors:

Katja Aglert,Tarsh Bates, adrienne maree brown, Mel Y. Chen, Pauline Doutreluingne, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jes Fan, Ibrahim Fazlic, Jack Halberstam, niilas helander, Stefanie Hessler, Jenny Hval, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Jessie Kleemann, Audre Lorde, Nina Lykke, Montserrat Madariaga-Caro, Camila Marambio, Astrida Neimanis, Pedro Neves Marques, Okwui Okpokwasili, Marie Helene Pereira, Margrethe Pettersen, Laure Prouvost, Filipa Ramos, Catriona Sandilands, Sami Schalk, Serubiri Moses, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Kim TallBear, Anna Tje, Alberta Whittle, Victoria Wibeck, Elvia Wilk

Copublished with Kunsthall Trondheim (Norway) and the Seed Box (Sweden)

Through a series of prayers, invocations, and hymns, Syncope eulogizes those who have perished making Central Mediterranean crossings as well as collects first-hand accounts of those who have survived these perilous journeys. Forces of fate brought errant lives together for a hopeful safe passage and ultimately, linked these lives in their untimely deaths. Syncope attempts to shed some light on these lives, as well as the happenstance of living and dying while trying to cross a border.

Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, published by Nightboat Books in 2018, day pulls down the sky… a filament in gold leaf written collaboratively with Okwui Okpokwasili (2019, Belladonna/ Danspace), and Syncope (UDP 2019). Her collection No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body (Nightboat Books) is forthcoming in 2020. Asiya teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School and leads an English conversation group for new immigrants at the Brooklyn Public Library.