The Brooklyn Rail

Nell Breyer speaks with choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili and dance dramaturg Katherine Profeta about recent and upcoming projects at the Whitney, MoMA PS1, and elsewhere. The three artists reflect on the “dance in museum” landscape, transmission versus transaction, embodied memory, and more.

Katherine Profeta: It’s fantastic that visual art curators are welcoming dance into the museum these days, but does that also mean dance artists and visual artists are opening new conversations between them? Maybe. But not necessarily.

Nell Breyer (Rail): Maybe. Perhaps not the way Richard Serra and Joan Jonas did, walking the landscape together in 1970, marking outer limits of their mutual viewpoint with what becomes his large-scale sculpture Shift (1970–72.) Serra draws the distance they move without losing sight of each other, into sculptural topographies, creating a dynamic “way of measuring oneself against the indeterminacy of the land.”¹ Serra, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Philip Glass, many Judson-era artists were ingesting choreographic experiments outside theaters—in museums, lofts, landscapes, etc.²

Tino Sehgal’s “constructed situations,”³ like This is good (2001) or This is progress (2010), return movement to museums thirty years after Judson, but are expressly presented as art, not dance. Sehgal’s practice, along with French artists like Jérôme Bel, Boris Charmatz, and Xavier Le Roy, often use moving bodies inside and outside the museum, to break the fourth wall, bringing audiences into a situational critique of institutional hierarchies, consumer culture, labor, and capitalism. Dance is a live transaction, anti-object and finite. Its value directly correlates to its liveness.

Okwui Okpokwasili: But the language of transaction is steeped in the logic of capital! Recently, I’ve been in conversations with movement artists thinking about transmission not transaction. Something that awakens memory and imagination.

Profeta: Performance has been based on ephemerality forever, but capitalism still managed to get its hands on that! You still have a transactional relationship with tickets exchanged for experience. I don’t think not having objects gets us out of it. I like where Okwui is going in terms of an experience that dodges transaction.

Okpokwasili: Beyond value exchange, you might be receiving some memory or prompt to wake up to a thing you may already possess.

Profeta: Memory and imagination are in you already when you walk in the room. You’re talking about activation?

Okpokwasili: Yes, activation, imprinting. Waking up to your own body, the performers, and the space. In a way, that is what art does. We don’t always go to art because it’s something never seen before. It wakes up something familiar, some idea that’s been latent in you. “Oh, wait! I’ve been missing this and it’s been around me the whole time!”

Rail: Charmatz describes movement as a “tool for permeability between the bodies.”⁴ His Musée de la danse questions where memories of movement live in the body.⁵ I’ve been collaborating on a project inspired by Louise Bourgeois’s “Femme Maison” series,⁶ thinking about our bodies as living, waking, breathing museums, storage places, resources to mine. Because we all have bodies, our movements become a conduit to empathetically build emotional and psychophysical understandings of the other. Movement offers fundamentally different interior representations than those gleaned from standing before or scrolling across a painting. You can’t be a picture, but you are always a body.

Okpokwasili: I love this idea of a conduit. A pathway to each other. I saw Kazuo Ohno dance when he was ninety in his studio. I was taking classes with his son, Yoshito Ohno. To see Kazuo Ohno—he wasn’t even standing. He was in a chair. It was all just happening in his face. Incredible, what it demanded of me, to watch the face dance along a landscape of memory. What is he remembering? I felt like he was inviting me into a very intimate shared space.

Profeta: Everything Nell just mentioned about the body as an archive for movement is exactly what Netta Yerushalmy and I were talking about for her last piece, Movement.⁷

Rail: Ah! You were the dramaturg?

Profeta: Yes. We asked: What already lives in the bodies of dancers? How do we use this material? The question of choreographic ownership is a deep, complicated one. But these dancers access this movement profoundly, and in some way, own it.

Rail: They can inhabit and instantiate it.

Profeta: Which was why we had so much fun making the credits at the end of the piece. Every single one of these phrases had a story: how it was learned, when, from whom, in what context, what it meant. You are not just carrying around a whole archive of movements in your body. You are carrying a whole archive of embodied memories, stories, past generations’ stories, transmissions leading up to and through you. The cast was all professional dancers, so the material in their personal body archives included some famous concert dance pieces. But there were many other kinds of movement, too, from locations around the globe, from folk dances to pop culture you learned off the TV because you thought it was cool. What a joy to collect all that material and think about the wealth of information behind each little step!

The credits at the end were partial, because it could only be as long as we thought the audience could watch—so just a teeny, tiny smidge of the total movement in that piece. For Skirball Center, we published full credits online, attempting to cite every single movement. Still not fully full. Still partial—

Okpokwasili: —partially full, or fully partial?

Rail: Even with stories, what makes an individual movement meaningful is mysterious. Side-by-side, the Whitney Museum’s Edges of Ailey (September 25, 2024–February 9, 2025) offers dance-making ideas, while the Ailey company’s winter season (December 4, 2024– January 5, 2025) offers Ailey (and other) dances. Neither pinpoints the crystallization of a movement phrase into something more significant. A dance like Revelations (on stage, as in exhibition) is a sixty-five-year-old immutable force of repertory, all-encompassing, like a weather system. How do circling torsos with straight arms held up to the sky, fingers flared, palms flat open to the audience hold so much meaning?

Profeta: There’s no short answer to that question…

Okpokwasili: Well, I’ll quickly talk about what I and Peter Born are working on now (performances at the Whitney Museum, February 6–8, 2025). It is extended research for our adaku trilogy, a mythology. There’s a nice dovetail with Ailey because our piece is concerned with memory awakened. The trilogy begins with an argument within a village that escalates and leads to the kidnapping of a young girl who is then sold into chattel slavery. The second part begins several generations later, in the present, with a girl who is a descendant of the first stolen girl. And it is this descendant who experiences an awakening, and remembers the first rupture. The piece uses the lens of hair: the hair becomes a conduit to this memory retrieval. What are the most extreme outcomes for a Black girl who, from the time she was a toddler, has been in the cycle of chemically straightening or hot combing her hair to achieve a disciplined, straightened look, to be deemed “presentable” enough to go out in public?

There are Black girls getting their hair chemically straightened before they have their adult teeth in. Chemically straightening your hair can lead to permanent scarring. Black girls are being wounded. And the chemical that burns your scalp, or the hot comb scars, echo the mental/psychic scarring that occurs when a natural part of you is deemed unruly, and has to literally be ironed into shape. In my story, the protagonist has been under this regimen of discipline and takes it so far she loses all of her hair. What grows back is something beyond hair, and it connects this girl to her past, allowing her to travel across oceans of time, to reach back and awaken a connection within her to the past and then even to the future.

For the Whitney, we’re working on a kind of portal that facilitates transmission. Of course, it’s not literal; it’s a durational piece, with a practice to open the possibility of those reconnections. I’m thinking about the private social spaces of my own heritage—because I grew up watching people dance—as well as the vocabulary from the bodies of people in the work. Peter Born, my partner, is constructing this deeply moving sound score and visual world.

Rail: That idea of movement incarnating the past through instantiating the present is beautiful—basically, the job of our DNA! A recipe of lives past, embodied in the present, seeding themselves into the future. It is particularly strong in the context of dance in museums. Charmatz humorously warns that dance’s “liveliness” could be “killed” by museums “of dead objects.”⁸ Modern museums, born from “Kunstkammer”⁹ catalogues of human and natural wonders, could be seen (uncharitably) as institutions to stuff, study, and sort. Before museums, visual (like performing) arts inhabited public and spiritual places: churches, temples, and public squares, the everyday and the sacred.

Okpokwasili: Providing a way to keep you in relation to the past and your ancestors, as well as in a place of stewardship for the future.

Profeta: In much religious art, stories are thought of as timeless. Every action at every moment can be in relation to that story. Instead of a sense of linear time, there is a sense of omnipresence. We are always in this story. We interpret everything around us in terms of this story. Art just kept this story alive.

Rail: Okwui, your High Line processional from 2021 reflects similar qualities. On the way, undone offers haunting vocals, augmented by dragging amplifiers and extraterrestrial headdresses of mirrored lighting coils designed by Peter. Your song sounds resonate over a longer time frame than the dance. Like Katherine and Netta’s program notes citing movement sources with lingering stories, your vocal vibrations anchor the dance inside the audience, as if a priori.

Voices jump toward us from a distance, before dance is visible. When four performers emerge, finally visible on the High Line, singing, trudging toward a seated audience, the song is already in our bodies. We sense a collapsing distance sonically, in our bones. As the danced chant approaches, it churns everyone together into a pack traveling as a collective processional towards Simone Leigh’s giant bronze bust Brick House (2019), as if we have joined an Aristotelian, pre-tragedy, dithyrambic chorus.¹⁰

Okpokwasili: In a chorus, you are steeped in sonic vibration. You access your partners through this ongoing vibration. This changes how we are anchored in space. If you close your eyes with a chorus, you are a part of a bigger body. In pre-colonial West African Igbo culture, one of the highest qualities is being useful. What can you add to a conversation to help solve a collective problem? The chorus is somehow about usefulness. That chorus is a profound model of human relation and it is integral to how I think about performance.

Rail: You have said a genesis for your dances is creation of a song.

Okpokwasili: I often start with language. The adaku trilogy began with a song. For the Whitney, I have a couple of songs.

Rail: Katherine, how do you approach transmission of story in choreographic dramaturgy?

Profeta: If I’m doing my job right, I’m listening carefully for how this piece wants to organize itself through time. When something’s far enough along that I feel like I can hear what is trying to emerge, then let’s name that thing, provisionally at least. Let’s have a good conversation (in that classic anthropomorphic way) about, “what does the piece want?” I’m looking for structure, or narrative, all that’s just bubbling up. What’s the question? What arc through time serves that investigation best?

Dramaturgy in Motion,¹¹ explores how everything—if it’s a time-based art—takes you on this little narrative journey. Our brains narrativize mini cause-and-effect stories. “That happened because this happened.” Even watching the most abstract work, you tell yourself little stories. They might only be your stories, not be shared with anybody else, but you have to acknowledge that’s one of the ways—not the only, but one of the main ways—human brains make meaning.

Rail: Ralph Lemon’s show at MoMA PS1¹² (November 14, 2024–March 24, 2025) is another dance in museum exploration. Did either of you work on it?

Profeta: Yes. Ceremonies Out of the Air. It’s gorgeous! It includes a video installation of Rant #3,¹³ capturing a performance at the Kitchen in 2020 a week before the pandemic shut everything down.

Okpokwasili: Rant #3 was part of a platform series I co-curated with Judy Hussie-Taylor called Utterances from the Chorus,¹⁴ harkening to Saidiya Hartman’s book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.¹⁵

Utterances stems from my continued interest in the chorus. I had another piece anchoring it, Sitting on a Man’s Head (2020), an improvisational, collective practice of memory and sounding, singing, crying, and laughing with strangers mediated by artist activators. We asked Ralph to do Rant #3, a particular kind of chorus.

Profeta: A physical dance chorus with four brilliant dancers.¹⁶ Also, Okwui and Samita Sinha vocalizing. Kevin Beasley provides this amazing wall of sound that keeps building and building. The installation of Rant #3 sits in the gallery close to Ralph’s devotional drawings, built up from daily practice, offering refractions of Black art history and everyday Black stories. The whole exhibit includes powerful live performances (like Tell it anyway (2024), which we worked on this past November), while the video installation archives live performance.

I am working on Ralph’s In proximity (performances at MoMA PS1, January 16 and 18, 2025) and on a continued project with Ralph and Darrell Jones, trying to write about Darrell’s Low (2004–25) dance practice (performances February 20 and 22, 2025), which always threatens to disappear and sometimes goes down to no movement at all. Okwui is back performing at PS1 in Rant #6 on March 22.