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Review: Okwui Okpokwasili Gives Voice to the Ignored and Oppressed

Okwui Okpokwasili and Katrina Reid in the dance “Poor People’s TV Room.”Credit...Paul B. Goode

Okwui Okpokwasili’s “Poor People’s TV Room” is as dense and delicate as a centuries-old tapestry. It can be oblique, but it’s also alive as it drifts through myriad subjects to conjure a surreal, imaginary place where, you get the distinct feeling, women have long been oppressed and ignored, or worse: treated like victims.

At least in Ms. Okpokwasili’s deconstructed, trippy world, they have a voice: “There was a time — way, way back — when Oprah was a human being, just a woman, she felt pain and she suffered.”

Those words, spoken by Thuli Dumakude, the veteran South African singer and actress, are an introduction to Ms. Okpokwasili’s dark wit. Created with the visual designer and director Peter Born, “Poor People’s TV Room” is blanketed in such gleaming darkness that the stage takes on a painterly quality. Sometimes the distancing works, but in other moments the theatricality feels forced, as if the creators were faithfully adhering to the rules of a deconstructionist playbook.

The piece was partly inspired by women’s resistance movements in Nigeria, though that isn’t necessarily discernible in the final product, which blends dance, music and theater. What is obvious is how Ms. Okpokwasili’s virtuosity — she can’t tame her magnificence — overshadows the other performers. She’s a force.

The stage is animated before we enter New York Live Arts, where the work continues through Saturday. Under shadowy lighting, a sheet of plastic cuts across the performance space and ripples as dancers, whose bodies are dimly silhouetted, vibrate in the near-dark. This quiet swirl of activity makes sense: In “Poor People’s TV Room,” the body and the mind are in communion, creating a trickle of motion that, from one action to the next, feels like a slowly cascading avalanche.

The collaborators play with shifting perspectives: Ms. Okpokwasili and Katrina Reid stretch out on a table — it looks like a bed — and are filmed from above. A live feed is then projected onto a screen, which renders them vertical. One appears to sit; the other stands by a window.

Separating what is real and what is imaginary creates some confusion in this work. “Poor People’s TV Room” is most rooted in its pure-movement sections, as when Ms. Dumakude and Nehemoyia Young, often paired, shuffle forward in parallel steps that hiccup in time. In a hypnotic section, Ms. Okpokwasili creates an intricate choreographic web with braiding arms and forceful palms. Engulfed by her gestural movement, she drops to the floor and rises again and again as if possessed by spirits. One thing is certain: “Poor People’s TV Room” is full of them.

Poor People’s TV Room
Through April 29 at New York Live Arts, Manhattan; newyorklivearts.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Surreal Voice for the Oppressed and Ignored. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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