Choreographer and director Ogemdi Ude leads "Watch Me" a lecture performance analyzing her latest work on majorette dance, a form that originated in the American South within Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the 1960s; Watch Me, a book exploring her discovery of majorettes in her childhood; and MAJOR, a dance theater piece exploring the physicality, history, sociopolitics, and interiority of majorettes. Ude will investigate how the body contends with conflicting histories of movement, from a past and present self. What reverberation unfolds at the intersection of dancing in forms that wanted your body and in forms that didn’t?

B.L.A. Co-Director Rebecca Fitton will facilitate a talk back and brief Q+A following Ogemdi's lecture performance.

Joe Goode Annex is a wheelchair accessible venue and features a no-step entry. For additional access services, please contact admin@bridgelivearts.org at least two days before the event.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ogemdi Ude is a dance and interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at Kampnagel, New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Center for Performance Research, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. As an educator, she has taught at The New School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and University of the Arts. She is a 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Choreography, 2025 Princess Grace Honoraria in Choreography, 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2024 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient, and a Live Feed Residency Artist at New York Live Arts. She has been a 2024/2025 BAX Artist-in-Residence, 2024-2025 Leslie Lohman Artist Fellow, 2022-2024 Movement Research 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. Most recently, she has published a book Watch Me in a collection edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study, published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.

Photo by Chidozie Ekwensi