Poor People's TV Room

Choreographer, writer, and performer Okwui Okpokwasili and director Peter Born presented their work, Poor People’s TV Room. Okpokwasili had been to EMPAC previously to perform for choreographers Nora Chipaumire and Ralph Lemon. As choreographer, Okpokwasili’s style transcends genre categories like experimental theater and conceptual choreography. The artist performed with three other women in a multifaceted work using live song, dance, and text amid other media including television, audio recording, light, plastic, cloth, and wood.

Poor People’s TV Room took inspiration from the Bring Back Our Girls campaign, started by a group of Nigerian women in 2014 to raise awareness about the Boko Haram kidnappings of 300 young Chibok girls. The campaign turned into a global movement after gaining widespread attention through social networking platforms such as Twitter. Since the speed of this online phenomenon ultimately overpowered the voices of the indigenous Nigerian women who started the movement, Okpokwasili used live performance to refocus our attention. Acknowledging a history of Nigerian women’s collective action, Okpokwasili wove the Bring Back Our Girls narrative with The Women’s War of 1929, an early anti-colonial revolt organized by women of six Nigerian ethnic groups.

Okpokwasili spent a week installing and finalizing Poor People’s TV Room for the New York City premiere of the work. 

Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, writer, and performer who has shown her work at New York’s Lincoln Center, PS122, Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, and the Walker. She has toured her work internationally at Théâtre de Gennevillers and Theatre Garrone in France, The Zagreb Youth Theater in Croatia, and Arts House in Australia. Peter Born is a Brooklyn-based director, designer, and filmmaker who, in addition to working with Okpokwasili, has worked with clients including Vogue, Bloomingdales, and the Wall Street Journal, and with collaborators ranging from Kanye West to NoStringsUS Puppet Productions.