Adaku, Part 2

Sweat Variant is the dance theater group of award-winning artists Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, is described by Dance Magazine as “elastic and electric, luxuriantly rippling, poetically arranged with moments of perfect stillness that arrive amid splashes of expression.”

 

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, we investigate the embodied impact of this violent rupture, while also considering the devastating consequences of the theft of artifacts designed to protect ancestral bonds. Part two sets us in the U.S. in the near future, where this history has been forgotten and where we excavate 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? Using text, sound, song, movement and spatial design, Sweat Variant’s multidisciplinary approach to the dance theatrical form considers cycles of ritual and repair.