With Womens Work: Ogemdi Ude - 368
Thursday, April 22nd, at 8pm EST, ISSUE is pleased to stream 368, a new work by dance artist Ogemdi Ude. The piece is part of the With Womens Work series, commissioning artists to interpret and respond to scores included in Womens Work, a magazine first edited and self-published in 1975 by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood.
Dance artist Ogemdi Ude steps into the intricate and intimate instructions of Alison Knowles' "Proposition IV (Squid)" score through a dance film that reckons with loss and accumulation, and embodied approaches to mapping private space.
Notes from Ogemdi Ude on 368:
In 368, I use Knowles’ data and instructions as a roadmap for investigating my own private space. Sound opens a portal into what lays beyond the visual boundaries of my face and upper body: my home. I followed the sounds, colors, and physical shifts that my home announces and attempted to hold them within me. Although I made my home, I am still learning how my home makes and made me.
Ogemdi Ude is a Nigerian-American dance artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn, New York. She creates performances that investigate how Black folks’ cultural, familial, and personal histories are embedded in their bodies and influence their everyday and performative movement. She aims to incite critical engagement with embodied Black history as a means to imagine Black futurity. Her work has been presented at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Danspace Project, Gibney, Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, Lewis Center for the Arts, La Mama Courthouse, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. She currently serves as Head of Movement for Drama at Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan. She is a 2021 Laundromat Project Artist in Residence, a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement Grantee, a member of Gibney’s 2020 Moving Toward Justice Cohort, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English, Dance, and Theater from Princeton University.
ISSUE Project Room's With Womens Work Series is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and a grant from The Howard Gilman Foundation for 2021 online artist commissions. ISSUE gratefully acknowledges additional 2021 Winter/Spring Season support from TD Charitable Foundation and Metabolic Studio (a direct charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation).