EVA YAA ASANTEWAA GRANT 2020 FINALIST
OGEMDI UDE
Ogemdi Ude is a Nigerian-American dance artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn, NY. She creates performances that investigate how Black folks’ cultural, familial, and personal histories are embedded in their bodies and influence their everyday and performative movement. She aims to incite critical engagement with embodied Black history as a means to imagine Black futurity. Her work has been presented at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Danspace Project, Gibney, Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. She currently serves as Head of Movement for Drama at Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English, Dance, and Theater from Princeton University.
Dig/Hear/Sing/
Work-in-progress showing of the first "Grief Score." Performed by Ogemdi Ude, presented at Gibney's ShowDown series, footage by Chidozie Ekwensi. 2019.
Dig/Hear/Sing/ is a project unfolding in two mediums. The first part of the project is a book of dance scores, personal essays, and theory that takes a Black feminist approach to unpacking death, memory, and mourning. The second part of the project is a series of three solos known as “Grief Scores,” in which Ogemdi uses movement, voice, and installation to derive coping rituals in the aftermath of trauma. The culmination of the project will be a series of 3 pop-up performances held at sites of Black feminist significance in Harlem, New York, including the Harriet Tubman Memorial, Speakers’ Corner on 135th and Lenox, and the former site of the Women of Color Press.