MAJOR

Ogemdi Ude brings MAJOR to the Wexner Center for the Arts from April 15 to 17, 2027. It's a dance-theater piece commissioned by the Wexner, and it runs Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at 7 PM. Each performance lasts about 90 minutes with no intermission.

MAJOR centers on majorette dance, a form that grew out of the American South at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the 1960s. Back then, Black femme teams performing with marching bands built a style defined by showmanship, count, undulation, groove, and a strong, sensual performativity. Ude's work looks at the physicality, the history, and the sociopolitical nature of that tradition, as well as the interiority behind it. Six Black femmes take the stage to work their way back to the younger bodies they thought they'd lost, set to a score by composer Lambkin that folds in Southern rap, horns, drumlines, and melodic R&B and soul. Ude describes the piece as a love letter to the people who taught the team how to be proudly Black and proudly femme.

Ude is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on Black femme legacies, grief, and memory. In 2022, Dance Magazine featured Ude on the cover of its '25 to Watch' issue. The performance is part of a larger project: The Chord Archive, a physical and digital record of the creative process and personal accounts from former majorette dancers, will be on display in the lobby.

Tickets are $35 for members, $45 for the general public, $42 for adults 55 and over, and $12 for students. The show runs at the Wexner Center's Black Box on Mershon Stage, 1871 N. High Street, Columbus, OH 43210.