ADAKU, PART 2 to Have World Premiere Across Multicity US Tour

sweat variant / Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born will present their new cross-disciplinary performance, adaku, part 2, at major venues across the US during the 2026-27 season, including the Wexner Center for the Arts (OH), Brooklyn Academy of Music (NY), ASU Gammage (AZ), the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (MA), the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (IL), and the Walker Art Center (MN).

Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born carry a deep 20-year history of collaboration, creating numerous acclaimed performance, installation, and film works. Working at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art, their powerful, highly experimental, and formally inventive works center Black interiority, exploring themes of embodied inheritance, memory, and the power of ritual, inviting audiences into spaces of 'radical intimacy' and reflection.

The adaku trilogy is a speculative mythology about how one family in precolonial West Africa becomes entangled in the transatlantic slave trade. In part 2 of this mythology, sweat variant investigates the embodied impact of this violent rupture, while also considering the devastating consequences of the theft of artifacts designed to protect ancestral bonds. Set in a near future United States, adaku, part 2 excavates the consequences of erasure when events lead to sudden remembering. What is unleashed in the imagination of a young woman who has been led to believe she has no history worth remembering? What are the multitude of futures she can now imagine? sweat variant's multidisciplinary approach considers cycles of ritual and repair.

Co-created by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. Written by Okwui Okpokwasili. Director/Production Designer: Peter Born. Performed by Bria Bacon, audrey hailes, Okwui Okpokwasili, Ny Opong, and AJ Wilmore. Stage and Company Manager: Alayna McCabe. Technical and Lighting Director: Michaelangelo DeSerio. Production Managers: Jared Klein and Brian Scott. Dramaturg: Katherine Profeta. Access Dramaturg: Kayla Hamilton. Producer: Annabel Heacock. Producing Strategist: Linsey Bostwick. Strategic Consultant: Cathy Zimmerman. Studio and Initiatives Manager: Kearra Gopee.

Recorded Wailing Chorus: Rena Anakwe, Holland Andrews, Olithea Anglin, Bria Bacon, yuniya edi kwon, Kris Lee, Okwui Okpokwasili, AJ Wilmore. Wailing Chorus Recording Engineer: Vishal Nayak. Wailing Chorus Co-Sound Designer: Will Johnson.

In addition to the performances, both the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston will present accompanying solo exhibitions inspired by the physical research developed for adaku, part 2, and will feature a new sculptural and video-based installation. The ICA/Boston exhibition will also feature the installation from my tongue is a blade, which will be activated by local performers throughout the six month exhibition.

TOUR SCHEDULE FOR ADAKU, PART 2

2026

October 20-22: Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (World Premiere)

November 11-15: BAM Fisher, presented by BAM in association with L'Alliance New York's Crossing The Line Festival (New York Premiere)

2027

January 23: ASU Gammage, Tempe, AZ

April 9-10: Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, MA

April 30-May 1: The Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Urbana, IL

May 7-8: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN

EXHIBITIONS

September 20, 2026-January 24, 2027: Wexner Center for the Arts

February 11-August 1, 2027: Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

For more information about the tour, visit: www.sweatvariant.com. Additional engagements to be announced.

adaku, part 2 is commissioned by Aspen Art Museum, The Wexner Center for the Arts, and Yale Schwarzman Center as lead commissioners, and is co-commissioned by the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN). adaku, part 2 is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by ASU Gammage, CAP UCLA, DiverseWorks, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Walker Art Center, and NPN. For more information www.npnweb.org. adaku, part 2 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. adaku, part 2 is also supported by the Harkness Foundation for Dance. Thank you to the J.E. Commission Fund and David Thomson for additional support for the development of adaku, part 2.

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sweat variant is the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. Since 1996, they have been working at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art to make challenging and rigorous work that reaffirms that which has been deemed marginal as the true center through the exploration of Black interiority. Okpokwasili and Born are interested in building a spectacle of radical intimacy, in which both performers and audience are acknowledged as being locked in a mutual gaze. They hope to activate a space that allows the audience to question who they are looking at, and how they are looking.

Okpokwasili and Born have created the Bessie Award-winning pent up: a revenge dance and Bronx Gothic. The latter continues to tour internationally, most recently to the 2024 Milan Triennale. Other performances include let slip, hold sway, adaku, part 1: the road opens, Adaku's Revolt, swallow the moon, Sitting on a Man's Head, and poor people's TV room, which also toured the US. Their work has been featured internationally, including at the Berlin Biennale, the Young Vic, and the Tate. Recent works include installations in the exhibitions Grief and Grievance, Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum (NYC), Witch Hunt at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and Sex Ecologies at Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway. poor people's TV room (solo) installation is in the Hammer Museum and Whitney Museum collections.

Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performer, actor, choreographer, and writer. Okpokwasili has earned numerous accolades, including a 2025 Art Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. Okpokwasili was the 2015-2017 Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist. She was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA in 2022, and an artist in residence at the Brown Arts Institute in 2023. She continues to collaborate with Ralph Lemon, Kevin Beasley, Saidiya Hartman, and Kaneza Schaal, among other artists.

Peter Born (he/him) works as a director, composer, and designer of performance and installation. In collaboration with Okpokwasili, Born's work has been featured in the Berlin Biennale, Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum, Witch Hunt at the Hammer Museum, Loophole of Retreat: Venice, Sex Ecologies at Kunsthall Trondheim, as well as performance work at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, MASS MoCA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and ICA Boston, among others. He is the recipient of four New York Dance Performance 'Bessie' Awards. His work as an art director and prop stylist has been featured in video and photo projects with Vogue, Estée Lauder, Barney's Co-op, Bloomingdales, Old Navy, 25 magazine, The Wall Street Journal and No Strings Puppet Productions.

audrey elaine hailes (she/we) is a movement-theater artist based up and down the Eastern Seaboard. hailes has had the privilege of collaborative and performative relationships with Maria Bauman, Nina Angela Mercer, Paloma McGregor, Ebony Golden, Okwui Okpokwasili, Ani Taj, among others, and has served as movement consultant and associate choreographer at institutions including New York University-Abu Dhabi, The Kennedy Center, Atlantic Theatre Co. and Baltimore Center Stage. hailes's own choreography has been commissioned by Gibney Dance, Dance Theatre Etc, Movement Research, BAAD!, and New York Live Arts.

AJ Wilmore, (they/she) born and raised in Philadelphia on the land known as Lenapehoking, the ancestral home of the Lenni-Lenape people, Wilmore is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer whose practice is shaped by questions of storytelling, identity, and the complexities of Black familial relationships. A 2020 graduate of University of the Arts, Wilmore has performed in works by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Ralph Lemon, Joan Jonas, MBDance, and Jonathan Gonzalez. In 2025 they performed in OO-GA-LA Reimagined, a reimagining of the 1983 duet by Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones for Danspace Project's 50th anniversary. They've participated in performances presented at venues including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Abrons Arts Center, MoMA and MoMA PS1, Danspace Project, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Judson Memorial Church, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, International Theater Amsterdam, and Teatro Goldoni Venice. A 2025 Dancing While Black Fellow, Wilmore recently premiered their first experimental film, Untitled (434). Their practice—driven by making love to their fears—investigates the stakes, texture, and vulnerability of their social and sexual life.

Bria Bacon (she/her) is an embodied movement scientist and artist, holding passions and gifts in dance, theater, writing, sound-making, and singing. She has worked with Bebe Miller Company, Stefanie Batten Bland, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, chameckilerner, Wendell Gray II, Sally Silvers, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Stephen Petronio Company, and Kyle Marshall Choreography, as well as Beth Gill and Rachel Comey in NYFW and Company Christoph Winkler in Berlin, DE. Currently, she is in-lab and performing with sweat variant, Saidiya Hartman, and Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group, among others. Bacon's work is being supported, as a 2026 BAX Space Grantee. All praise to the angels, ancestors, and folx within her village.

Ny Opong (they/them) is a movement artist and performer. They received a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2019. Upon graduation they joined the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company where they were a member from 2019 to 2024. After leaving the company they joined the cast of the immersive theater show Life and Trust until its closing in April 2025. Opong has also worked in collaboration with and performed in live works and dance films with many interdisciplinary artists. Through years of modern, jazz, West African, and ballet dance training partnered with various somatic practices and work with text and breath; Opong fuels what they have learned with what they have experienced to deepen their performance practice. They often work with improvisation as their movement medium in an effort to reveal the memories and stories that are held in their body, and discovering how those memories influence, affect and aid in how we shape our lives to move through the world.

For more information about Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, visit www.sweatvariant.com.

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