MAJOR by Ogemdi Ude
A Visions and Voices Signature Event

ADMISSION:
Admission is free. RSVP beginning Monday, January 5, at 10 a.m.

DESCRIPTION:
Don't miss the Los Angeles premiere of MAJOR, a dynamic new dance theatre performance exploring the history and carrying on the legacy of majorette dance.

In MAJOR, Brooklyn-based dance, theatre, and interdisciplinary artist and educator Ogemdi Ude mashes up majorette movement, verbatim theatre, and oral history to examine the dance form’s history and physicality, and explore how Black culture relocates, persists, and transforms over time and places.

“Exploring majorette practice is such a sweet nostalgic journey, and deeply humbling,” says Ude, who was included in Dance Magazine’s list of “25 to Watch” in 2022. She explains, “The challenge of this piece lies in reorganizing the body to dance in the ways you were born to, but have been trained out of. In MAJOR, audiences follow the intimate journey of returning to a body that you have lost.”

Accompanied by a digital archive featuring interviews with multigenerational HBCU majorettes, MAJOR is a dynamic love letter to the folks who taught the team how to be proudly Black and proudly femme.  

Choreographed to a score that integrates Southern rap, horns, drumlines, melodic R&B, and soul, the exciting and original performance will be followed by a conversation with Ude and performers.

Bio:

Brooklyn-based Ogemdi Ude is a Black queer femme dance and interdisciplinary artist, educator, and doula whose 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. As an educator, she has taught at The New School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and University of the Arts. She is a 2025–28 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2024 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient, a Live Feed Residency Artist at New York Live Arts, and a 2024–25 BAX Artist-in-Residence. She has been a 2022–24 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019–20 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, Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study, published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices. Co-sponsored by the USC Kaufman School of Dance.

MAJOR is commissioned by New York Live Arts and Kampnagel with additional support from Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Danspace Project, Mercury Store, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

MAJOR has been supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, MAP Fund, a Brooklyn Arts Council grant, the Dance Advancement Fund from Dance NYC, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, and a Support for Artists Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Photo: Maria Baranova. Courtesy New York Live Arts.