Okwui Okpokwasili: Poor People’s TV Room

Theater review by Helen Shaw

There are two different pieces inside Okwui Okpokwasili's Poor People's TV Room—one that is deeply informed by Nigerian political history, and one that washes over you as a mysterious chaos. I experienced them in syncopated time, because I read about the former after experiencing the latter. So, will you recognize the oblique references to Nigerian market bombings? Will you recognize the Igbo women's anti-imperialist protest actions? You can enter into Okpokwasili's dance-theater work either knowing or not. Knowledge is power, but ignorance is a drug: one that lets you surrender swiftly to her dream world of fury, loss and tremendous unseen energies.

The preshow movement sequence is as beautiful as a stand-alone installation: It plays with silhouettes and doubling by using the set's main feature, a long wall made of stretched plastic. Designer Peter Born has set this sheeting at a diagonal across the New York Live Arts stage. And as we enter, Katrina Reid stands in front of it—frozen, backlit, back swayed, the heel of her hand to her forehead—while Okpokwasili shimmers like her brighter shadow, undulating in red light behind the blurring plastic. This is before the show begins. It's beside the point to talk about sequence in something that bleeds between dance-with-text and play-with-movement, but “scenes” in Poor People's TV Room include: a room tipped on its side that is righted by being seen in a video projection; a kind of ceremony for a woman wearing a suit made of metallic paillettes; a murmured comic monologue about t-shirt slogans (performed by Nehemoyia Young with the stunning actor Thuli Dumakude echoing her); and a recurring dialogue between a disturbed woman (Okpokwasili) and her much put-upon housegirl (Reid).

Roughly, the show is two interlocking duets. Young and Dumakude sit gossiping on plastic chairs, their voices swelling up into sudden conversation. Dumakude sets a fairytale tone: “There was a time way way back when Oprah was a human being. She had deep wells of feeling. But she stood outside herself; she could measure it from root to blossom.” Later, she plays a woman who has to help her dying child breathe, as Young does strange movement passes across the floor, lying down and pushing herself along with her feet. Meanwhile, on the right side of the stage, Okpokwasili and Reid perform their interactions lying down on the “wall” of the tipped-over room. They sometimes strike attitudes that seem familiar from paintings (Reid suckling Okpokwasili, the two of them crawling “up” the wall to exit).

Okpokwasili is performer of extraordinary grace and power. She has a low, thrilling voice; she dances her shuddering dances like she's been plugged into a power-source that won't let her rest. And if you have been watching her in other people's work, including in Ralph Lemon's sensational Scaffold Room last year, you know how electrifying she is onstage. But Poor People's TV Room is her own complete artistic statement: hers from root to blossom. Sometimes a sequence goes on too long; occasionally the intensity needs relief. But I can't think of a piece this year that's been so unabashedly gorgeous. It's a series of astonishments, an abstract work with focused power—and not a person in New York should miss it.

New York Live Arts. By Okwui Okpokwasili. With ensemble cast. Running time: 1hr 20mins. No intermission. Through April 29.