OGEMDI UDE
Photo by Maria Baranova
NOVEMBER 8 & 15
10AM-12PM
$5-20 sliding scale
This class is a playful and provocative step into my recurring dance nightmare: I am put onstage with a dance company in front of hundreds of people, and everyone except me knows the choreography. We will draw from that fear and learn how to use forgetting to our advantage. I will introduce improvised scores and memory games and choreographic tools that ask us to make something out of our disjointed memories. We will also employ weight, tension, rebound, speed, and rigor. We will make complex choreographies from empty beginnings. We will find new ways to be brave in a scary field.
Photo by Rachel Keane
Ogemdi Ude is a Nigerian-American 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 Gibney, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, BAX, CPR, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. She serves as Head of Movement for Theater at Professional Performing Arts School and has taught at The New School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, MIT, and University of the Arts. She is a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and a 2024/2025 BAX Artist-in-Residence. She has been a 2022-2023 Smack Mellon 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.