adaku, part 2 Arrives at BAM After Wexner Premiere

Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born bring adaku, part 2: she shivers with it to the Brooklyn Academy of Music this weekend, after premiering the work last month at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. The piece is the second installment of a trilogy that began with 2023's adaku, part 1: the road opens.

Towards the end of part 1, the characters sing, "when the end becomes the beginning." That line turns out to be a stage direction. adaku, part 2 opens exactly where its predecessor closed: with a wail of grief, as a community mourns a loss wrought by the transatlantic slave trade. Then it moves forward, into a speculative future where the couple — married, and working under their company, sweat variant — trace what that wail carries.

"Can the wail be the thing that is moving in the body and through people across generations?" Okpokwasili said. "What is it to remember? What is held in the archive of the body?"

How do they build a world?

Peter Born describes a process that starts with text. Okwui Okpokwasili writes what he calls "a grounding mythology for everyone in the project."

"It gives us opportunities to speak ideas out loud," Born said. "The world stems from that kind of study, that deep questioning. What has Okwui written here? How does it impact us? How do we want to relay this to the audience? We're trying to create this energetic exchange, so the audience is definitely involved."

Okpokwasili frames the work in similar terms: "We're thinking about embodied lineage tracing. How do we hold people in our bodies? How do we hold conditions in our bodies? What is it that we transmit to each other? What do we remember of those transmissions? What are we haunted by?"

What is the installation?

A companion installation, where you go full, volume 5, remains open at the Wexner through January and will accompany the work's tour to the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston next year. It features Bria Bacon, Ny Opong, Kris Lee, AJ Wilmore and Okpokwasili herself, in duets and solos captured on video.

"It feels very much like a full world," Okpokwasili said. "There are these really delicate sculptural objects that they are projected onto, and the sonic score is there that accompanies us in these practices. It's a very full experience — you get to experience multiple registers of the world."

Born notes the installation makes demands of its viewer: "The person watching it has to essentially construct what they're watching, because the images are broken. You have to assemble what you're seeing yourself, so you become an active participant."

What about part 3?

Okpokwasili situates part 2 in "a kind of near future present, in a moment where there's some kind of reconnection to memory. It sits in the place of possibility."

Her sketch for the finale is ambitious. "In my mind, part 3 feels like an ultimate, massive kind of chorus where there are imaginings of the future and the past," she said. "But God knows what will happen when I get it out of the outline phase and into the practice phase."

Born offers a structural reading: "If we were to call part 3 'the chorus,' I think part 2 is: How does the chorus come together? How does a group of people who are separate individuals come together into one thing?"

What is it like being married to your collaborator?

The work, Born admits, doesn't clock out. "The last two weeks, we've been working all waking hours," he said. "It becomes all-consuming in a good way."

He credits his partner's stamina: "It would be hard if Okwui wasn't such an amazing artist. I feel that I've lucked out that I work with and am married to this partner who I think is brilliant... it's great to have this partner who is unflagging in her determination to keep working through things, even when they get difficult or messy."

Okpokwasili returns the compliment in craft terms. "Peter shapes these incredible energetic environments with materials that I don't necessarily work with. I don't know how to build anything," she said. "We meet in these beautiful places sonically, too, because I make sounds and utterances, and he is also building sonic environments that meet my utterances in ways that are really inspiring to me. We just keep making all of these places to meet anew, and to wonder with and at each other."

With BAM this weekend, the Wexner installation through January, and ICA/Boston next year, the adaku world keeps expanding — and part 3, still in outline, waits in the wings.