Malcolm-x Betts + Okwui Okpokwasili
Friday, May 22 | 8PM
Co-presented with Poetry Project
Malcolm-x Betts and Okwui Okpokwasili are both interdisciplinary artists who work in and around dance. Each of them, in their own ways, makes performances that articulate the expansive vision of the Black radical tradition, while simultaneously grounding that vision in everyday intensities of desire, grief, love, and rage. They both approach movement as a site of textual experimentation and language as a bodily material, working at the limit of what seems possible, approaching scenes of abandonment with abandon. For this shared evening, co-presented with Danspace Project, Betts and Okpokwasili will have an opportunity to highlight the presence of writing in their respective practices, each reading from new and in-progress works.
Before you visit:
Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project
Malcolm-x Betts is a New York based visual and dance artist who believes that art is a transformative vehicle that brings people and communities together. His artistic work is rooted in investigating embodiment for liberation, Black imagination, and directly engaging with challenges placed on the physical body.
Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer, and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in much of her work. Her productions include the Bessie Award-winning Bronx Gothic and the performance installation Sitting on a Man’s Head. In 2018, she received a Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a Herb Alpert Award in Dance, a Doris Duke Artist Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA in 2022. In 2025, she received an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.