Tickets are available 8/5 for members and 8/7 for nonmembers.
MAJOR is a dance theater project exploring the physicality, history, sociopolitics, and interiority of majorette dance, a form that originated in the American South within Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the 1960s. These Black femme teams accompanied by marching bands created a movement style that requires master showmanship with allegiance to count, undulation, groove, and sensual yet strong performativity.
In MAJOR, six Black femmes embrace majorette form – a fundamental relic of Black girlhood – to pursue the intimate journey of returning to bodies they thought lost. Experiments in improvised and verbatim language intertwine with a music score that integrates Southern rap, horns, drumlines, and melodic R&B and soul by Lambkin. A fierce investigation of physical memory and community, MAJOR is a nuanced love letter to the folks who taught the team how to be proudly Black and proudly femme.
About the artist
Ogemdi Ude is a dance and interdisciplinary artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Jacob’s Pillow, Lincoln Center, On the Boards/Seattle, Oz Arts/Nashville, Recess Art, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Center for Performance Research, and for BAM’s DanceAfrica festival. As an educator, she has taught at The New School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and University of the Arts. She is a 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2024 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient, a Live Feed Residency Artist at New York Live Arts, and a 2024/2025 BAX Artist-in-Residence. She has been a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. She has published a book Watch Me in a collection edited by Thomas DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.
MAJOR was commissioned by New York Live Arts and International Summer Festival Kampnagel with additional support from Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Danspace Project, Mercury Store, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). MAJOR has been supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, MAP Fund, a Brooklyn Arts Council grant, the Dance Advancement Fund from Dance NYC, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, and a Support for Artists Grant from the New York State Council for the Arts.
MAJOR is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by New York Live Arts in partnership with On the Boards, Bates College, Wexner Center for the Arts, John and Mable Tinglign Museum of Art, Duke University, and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.