Ogemdi Ude: MAJOR
Friday, June 19 | 6PM
Advanced RSVPs are full, and there is limited seating available on a first-come, first-served basis. Everyone is welcome to attend. Please bring water, blankets or camp chairs, and sunscreen.
To access the Boathouse, please enter Prospect Park at the Lincoln Road and Ocean Avenue entrance. For walking directions from this entrance, please view this Google Map: https://maps.app.goo.gl/
This celebratory Juneteenth performance of Ogemdi Ude’s MAJOR will take place at the Prospect Park Boathouse as a co-presentation between Danspace Project’s Platform 2026: Secret Gardens and Prospect Park Alliance’s ReImagine Lefferts initiative. This outdoor iteration kicks off MAJOR‘s summer tour of outdoor performances that delve into how technique, effort, and mastery can be attempted, achieved, and abandoned in pursuit of cultural belonging.
MAJOR is Ude‘s dance project exploring the physicality, history, and interiority of majorette dance and the Black Femmes that founded and continue to innovate the form. Majorette dance teams, accompanied by marching bands, created a movement style that requires master showmanship with allegiance to count, undulation, groove, and sensual yet strong performativity. MAJOR had its NYC premiere at New York Live Arts in January 2026.
Ude’s cast/team of Black femme collaborators embrace majorette dance as a form and fundamental relic of Black girlhood. The work follows their individual and collective intimate journey of return; a reclamation of body and embodiment. A fierce investigation of physical memory, sexuality, sensuality, and community, MAJOR is a nuanced love letter to majorettes and the people who taught this team how to be proudly Black and proudly femme.
The Chord Archive, developed in collaboration with artist, Myssi Robinson (who is both an archivist of MAJOR and Writer-in-Residence for the entire Platform 2026: Secret Gardens) is showcased alongside MAJOR performances, a physical and digital documentation of the creative process and personal historical accounts from former majorette dancers.
Prospect Park Alliance is the nonprofit that sustains, restores and advances Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s Backyard, for the diverse communities that call Brooklyn home. The Alliance’s ReImagine Lefferts initiative is transforming the park’s historic house museum to explore the legacies of resistance and resilience of the Indigenous people of Lenapehoking, whose unceded ancestral lands the park and house rests upon, and the Africans enslaved by the Lefferts family. Learn more at prospectpark.org.
Danspace Project presents new work in dance, supports a diverse range of choreographers in developing their work, encourages experimentation, and connects artists to audiences. Platform 2026: Secret Gardens, co-curated by Executive Director and Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor and Program Director and Associate Curator, Seta Morton, is the 17th Danspace Project Platform to date.
MAJOR was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. MAJOR is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.
Before you visit:
Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project
Ogemdi Ude is a dance and interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at New York Live Arts, Kampnagel, The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, and for BAM’s DanceAfrica festival. She is a 2026 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists recipient, 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Choreography, 2025 Princess Grace Honoraria in Choreography, 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and a 2024 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. She has published a book Watch Me in a collection edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.