Okwui Okpokwasili brings part 2 of the adaku trilogy to BAM this week (photo by Barsbold Enkhbold / Yale Schwarzman Center)
adaku, part 2: she shivers with it
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
November 11-15, $59
bam.org
lallianceny.org
Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, the married creative team known as sweat variant, return to BAM with the second part of their adaku trilogy, she shivers with it, for five performances November 11–15.
A presentation of BAM’s Next Wave Festival and L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line, the ninety-minute work is the follow-up to 2023’s the road opens, about which Parkchester-born dancer, actor, choreographer, and writer Okpokwasili explained in a BAM video at the time, “This piece is my attempt to think about a particular origin having grown up in the United States as a child of Nigerian immigrants. I understand something about where I am from and my connection to the motherland Africa, Nigeria, but then I feel also an inheritor of a kind of violence and a kind of rupture and a kind of erasure because of a particular colonial conquest.”
The second of what Okpokwasili, a MacArthur Fellow, calls “a speculative mythology” deals with the embodied impact of the transatlantic slave trade and the theft of ancestral artifacts through the legacy of one family. It features Bria Bacon, audrey hailes, AJ Wilmore, and Okpokwasili, with lighting by Michaelangelo DeSerio and costumes by James Gibbel. The recorded Wailing Chorus consists of Rena Anakwe, Holland Andrews, Olithea Anglin, yuniya edi kwon, Kris Lee, Bacon, Okpokwasili, and Wilmore.
Born serves as director, visual artist, and sound designer. Among sweat variants’ previous works are Adaku’s Revolt, pent up: a revenge dance, and Bronx Gothic.
“Part 1 ended with the wail and the missing,” Okpokwasili says in a BAM Instagram post. “Part 2 begins with the wail, and the events follow the kind of lineage of the wail. How is that cry echoing through time and through bodies?”
Okpokwasili and Born will address those questions and more in their uniquely powerful style.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]