Next Performing Arts | Dance

sweat variant

adaku, part 2

World Premiere

Two people embrace closely in dramatic lighting against a dark background, one with eyes closed and the other gazing upward.

Experience a multidisciplinary performance featuring movement, song, sound, text, and spatial design that considers cycles of ritual and repair.

The adaku trilogy is a speculative mythology about how one family in precolonial West Africa becomes entangled in the transatlantic slave trade. In part two of this mythology, sweat variant investigates the embodied impact of this violent rupture, while also considering the devastating consequences of the theft of artifacts designed to protect ancestral bonds. Developed in part through a technical residency at the Wex, adaku, part 2 is set in the US in the near future. The performance excavates the consequences of erasure when events lead to sudden remembering. What is unleashed in the imagination of a young woman who's been led to believe she has no history worth remembering? What are the multitude of futures she can now imagine? (program approx. 90 mins., no intermission)

Come early and explore the galleries to see sweat variant's video installation inspired by physical research for the performance.

adaku, part 2 is a stand-alone performance and can be engaged with and enjoyed without first seeing adaku, part 1.

IMAGE CAPTION
adaku, part 1, photo: Maria Baranova.

"For the past decade Okpokwasili...has been responsible for, or part of, the most compelling performance work to be seen on this country's stages."
The Village Voice

About the artists

Peter Born

Peter Born (he/him) works as a director, composer, and designer of performance and installation. In collaboration with Okpokwasili, Born’s work has been featured in the Berlin Biennale, Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum, Witch Hunt at the Hammer Museum, Loophole of Retreat: Venice, and Sex Ecologies at Kunsthall Trondheim. Their collaborative performance work has appeared at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum; MASS MoCA; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; and ICA Boston; among others. He is the recipient of four New York Dance Performance Awards (Bessie Awards). His work as an art director and prop stylist has been featured in video and photo projects with Vogue, Estee Lauder, Barney’s Co-op, Bloomingdales, Old Navy, 25 Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and No Strings Puppet Productions.

Okwui Okpokwasili

Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performer, actor, choreographer, and writer. Okpokwasili has earned numerous accolades, including a 2025 Art Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. Okpokwasili was New York Live Arts’ 2015–17 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist. She was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2022 and an artist in residence at the Brown Arts Institute in 2023. She continues to collaborate with Ralph Lemon, Kevin Beasley, Saidiya Hartman, and Kaneza Schaal, among other artists.

Program Support

adaku, part 2 is produced by sweat variant. For more information, visit sweatvariant.com.

adaku, part 2 is commissioned by Aspen Art Museum, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and Yale Schwarzman Center as lead co-commissioners. adaku, part 2 is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Walker Art Center, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, DiverseWorks, ASU Gammage, CAP UCLA and NPN. For more information www.npnweb.org. adaku, part 2 was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. adaku, part 2 is also supported by the Harkness Foundation for Dance.

PERFORMING ARTS PROGRAMS MADE POSSIBLE BY

Doris Duke Foundation

WEXNER CENTER PROGRAMS MADE POSSIBLE BY

Greater Columbus Arts Council

Ohio Arts Council, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts

CampusParc

The Columbus Foundation

The Ohio State University

Wexner Center Foundation Board

With special thanks to our members

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