adaku, part 1: the road opens

With her resonant voice and formidable intensity, Okwui Okpokwasili creates dance theater that stirs the senses and vibrates the soul, rooted as much in the power and precision of speech as in movement. In collaboration with her longtime partner, the director Peter Born, Okpokwasili has bucked convention by embracing the impromptu, running fearlessly towards the unknown and establishing herself as “an expectation-confounding blend of authority and vulnerability” (The New York Times).

adaku, part 1: the road opens finds Okpokwasili and Born stepping into a new stage of their shared practice, crafting a thrumming, richly textured sonic and visual landscape. In this inaugural chapter of a larger speculative mythology, a precolonial African village stands at the cusp of a major upheaval as its community wrestles with a conflict that could alter the futures of all of its members. Okpokwasili and the ensemble enact a collective reckoning that explores the role of ritual and the fraught relationship between ancestors and future generations, facilitating an intimate exchange between the performers and the audience.