Forget How To Dance with Ogemdi Ude

This class is a playful and provocative step into a recurring dance nightmare: Being put onstage with a dance company in front of hundreds of people, and not knowing the choreography. In this class dancers will draw from that fear and learn how to use forgetting to their advantage. Ogemdi will introduce improvised scores and memory games and choreographic tools that ask dancers to make something out of their disjointed memories. Dancers will employ weight, tension, rebound, speed, and rigor, make complex choreographies from empty beginnings, and find new ways to be brave in a scary field.

Ogemdi Ude is a Nigerian-American dance 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 Gibney, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, La Mama Courthouse, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. As an educator, she serves as Head of Movement for Theater at Professional Performing Arts School and has taught at Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, MIT, and University of the Arts. She is a 2022-2023 Smack Mellon Artist-in-Residence and 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. She has been 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. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English, Dance, and Theater from Princeton University.