Okwui Okpokwasili Explores Politics and the Body

In “Poor People’s TV Room,” the performer turns her attention to historic incidents in Nigeria, the birthplace of her ancestors.
In “Poor Peoples TV Room” Okpokwasili looks at the effects of history on Nigerian women.
In “Poor People’s TV Room,” Okpokwasili looks at the effects of history on Nigerian women.Illustration by Saiman Chow

When Okwui Okpokwasili speaks, let alone laughs, the sound comes from a deep place—from her diaphragm, certainly, but also from her history, which is as profound and complicated as the performer herself. Born in 1972 and raised in the Bronx, Okpokwasili is the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. She graduated from Yale University in 1996, and since then she has danced with the choreographer Ralph Lemon and performed in the director and writer Young Jean Lee’s “Lear,” among other productions. Okpokwasili has always been a standout in New York’s crowded performance scene, not least because of what she is able to do with her body: like a latter-day Judith Jamison, she makes whole narratives out of gestures—a back bend can intimate her irrepressible desire to take center stage and stay there.

In 2014, I saw Okpokwasili in her piece “Bronx Gothic,” and the top of my head blew off. She was dressed in a dark slip, and her long arms and legs jerked and twitched in an atmosphere composed of strewn papers, lamps, a microphone, and a scrim devised by her frequent collaborator and husband, Peter Born. The show’s script was a series of letters between two young girls in the Bronx; the talk turned to sex, and how little one knew about her body, and how much and how little the girls knew about how to connect. The piece is a tour de force on the order of Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” the author’s seminal text on black girlhood and power.

Now, with “Poor People’s TV Room” (at New York Live Arts, April 19-22 and April 26-29), Okpokwasili turns her attention to history and women’s bodies. The ninety-minute piece draws on two momentous incidents in Nigeria: the Women’s War of 1929, when black women challenged colonial British power, and, eighty-five years later, the Boko Haram kidnappings, which sparked the Bring Back Our Girls movement. Created in collaboration with Born, the piece looks backward and forward simultaneously, at a Nigeria that keeps reclaiming Okpokwasili, just as memory draws all of us back and won’t let us go. Incorporating text, movement, and sound, “Poor People’s TV Room” is part of the grand narrative about politics, the body, and place that Okpokwasili is building, gesture by gesture, whisper by whisper, brick by brick. ♦

An earlier version misstated the institution from which Okwui graduated in 1996. It was Yale University, not Yale School of Drama.