OKWUI OKPOKWASILI: POOR PEOPLE'S TV ROOM

April 12-15, 2018

Bessie Award-winning artist Okwui Okpokwasili debuts at the MCA with Poor People's TV Room, a kinetic history of collective action and resistance movements in Nigeria. The performance draws from an historical incident -- the Boko Haram kidnappings of more than 300 girls in 2014 -- in order to unearth buried stories of the country's women-led resistance campaigns. Okpokwasili performs with a cast of women from different generations in this collaboration with director/designer Peter Born that fuses choreography, song, text, and film to build a potent narrative around the impact of that erasure on Nigerian society today. Blended with Okpokwasili's aesthetic, Poor People's TV Room crosses disciplines to make a visceral performance where the past is alive and unleashed