The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Programs in Dance and Theater present there.remaining… a dance-theater fusion of text, movement, music, and projections, created and directed by senior Ogemdi Ude and featuring original music by Lewis Center Resident Musical Director and Composer Vince di Mura. Performances will take place on April 1, 2, 7, 8 and 9 at 8 p.m. in the Marie and Edward Matthews ’53 Acting Studio at 185 Nassau Street. The production is free and open to the public, however, advance tickets are recommended and are available through arts.princeton.edu. 

Emerging from W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, there.remaining. explores Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness as a racial and mental phenomenon. Created in collaboration with the six performers, the work questions the ways we see ourselves and how we come to understand our often conflicting identities.

Ude, who is from Stone Mountain, Georgia, and a first generation American of Nigerian-born parents, is a senior in the English Department pursuing certificates in Theater and Dance with a special interest in African American performance theory. As a junior, Ude was awarded a grant from the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Mallach Senior Thesis Fund, an award established by Douglas J. Mallach ’91 to support the realization of a proposed senior thesis project that incorporates historical research and creates an alternative path to learning history. With this funding, Ude spent the summer researching representations of “double consciousness” in contemporary Black performance art, attending a summer intensive with the dance-theater company Witness Relocation, where she studied the creation of original work through devising methods. She also worked with and interviewed African American artists in Chicago, St. Louis, and New York to advance her understanding of their processes of creation in various disciplines, focusing most on theater, dance, and mixed media art. Ude has become especially interested in how performers are viewed onstage, noting, “I’m interested in the gaze, and how we can use performance as a way of manipulating it and therefore transforming the ways others see us.”

As a recipient of the prestigious Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship, Ude will spend next year as a Sachs Global Scholar studying indigenous Australian physical theater in Melbourne, Australia.

To learn more about this event, visit arts.princeton.edu.