Choreographer/Director Ogemdi Ude is seeking performers for her new work “Major”, premiering at New York Live Arts in Fall 2025 and touring in 2026/2027. Major is a dance theater project engaging the history and physicality of Southern majorette dance as a means of physically investigating Black femme memory, sexuality, and sensuality. 

Seeking Black femme-identifying performers, inclusive of cisgender, transgender, non-binary, agender, and genderqueer identities. Performers should have a minimum of 2 years of professional experience and be based in NYC or the surrounding area. Performers should be skilled movers/dancers, audacious and risk taking improvisers, ready to engage in both physical and intellectual research, and have experience with and/or comfort in working with text/language. Performers do not have to have experience practicing majorette dance, but should have some knowledge of the form. Performers are expected to be clear and accountable communicators, community oriented, and respectful of a variety of identities. 

Performance Schedule:

January 11th, 2025: New York Live Arts Live Artery Festival Showing

March 2, 2025: Community engagement event at Brooklyn Arts Exchange

November 6-8, 2025: New York Live Arts Premiere

2026/2027 tour dates TBD

Invited Auditions: September 27th from 4:45-7:15pm 

Callbacks: September 28th from 12:30-4pm 

Audition Location: Manhattan, details shared upon invitation

Rehearsal rate: $35 per hour

Performance Fee: $350 per performance

Auditions are via invitation only. Learn more about the project, rehearsal schedule, and submit your materials at this link. Submit your materials by September 20, 2024 for consideration. Any questions? Email majordance2025@gmail.com

About Ogemdi 

Ogemdi Ude is a Black queer femme dance, theater, 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 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. She has taught at The New School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, MIT, and University of the Arts. She is a 2024/2025 BAX Artist-in-Residence. She has been a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, a 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 DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson entitled Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.