Artists Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, collaborators for nearly three decades under their company name Sweat Variant, recently presented a new three-hour work, my tongue is a blade. The work premiered at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in June 2025 and was later presented at Art Basel Qatar in Doha and on PS21’s The Dark festival in Chatham, New York, both in February 2026. The artists are currently at work on a new production at Yale, adaku, part 2.
At the center of my tongue is a blade is Okpokwasili’s ongoing exploration of Black interiority. Her work reflects her lived experience as a Black woman shaped by migration and lineage, as well as research into transatlantic displacement. Across earlier works such as Bronx Gothic and Poor People’s TV Room, she examined how history resides within the body and how memory continues to structure present experience. In that context, her focus on interior life carries a sharper meaning, given long histories in which Black women’s bodies were treated as laboring objects and sites of medical experimentation, and their emotional and psychological depth denied.
The piece unfolds over three hours and permits audience members to enter and leave during its duration. In conversation with the artists, Okpokwasili said, “We don’t all begin in the same place. You come in from wherever you’ve been.” The extended timeframe supports this premise and allows the material to accumulate.
The work opens with what Okpokwasili describes as “a kind of wail, which is like a sonic cry that is the engine for us in the piece.” From that sound, language forms and recedes. Solos move into duets and back again to solos. When one performer exits, the other continues, holding what Okpokwasili describes as “the thread of that wail and the thread of the duet and the person you’re in the space with.”
Born composes and designs the sonic and spatial environment in which this work unfolds. His installation consists of evenly spaced, hanging rectangular panels of two-sided glass arranged in a circle. The panels revolve slowly, pushed by dancers who step into and out of the ring. As they move the structure, the glass reflects the performers, the audience, and the surrounding room. Bodies appear in fragments; they multiply, slip away, and return as the circle turns.
The sound field is sustained and low, anchored by the cry. At intervals, the texture shifts with the shake of a percussion instrument or the whistle of a woodwind. Within the revolving circle, a solo dancer moves with a sinuous spine, her bent arms nearly enclosing her head. Later she lowers onto folded knees, her body pulsating in small, contained contractions.
Raised in the Bronx by Igbo parents who emigrated from Nigeria after the civil war, Okpokwasili works from a history marked by her parents’ displacement and survival. She is shaped by her experience as a child of immigrants. Okpokwasili and Born met as undergraduates at Yale in the mid-1990s and have sustained their collaboration across theaters, museums, galleries, and international art contexts. Okpokwasili, a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, is recognized for the scope and influence of her work. In public conversations, the artists describe their collaboration as operating at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art and as an exploration of what they call radical intimacy. The result is a sustained inquiry shared between two artists who have worked side by side for nearly 30 years.
Catherine Tharin is a choreographer, writer, curator, and educator. Her writing on dance has appeared in The Dance Enthusiast, Interlocutor, Side of Culture, and the Boston Globe. Tharin currently curates The Dance Series at the Stissing Center in Pine Plains, NY, and dance film at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY. Throughout her career, she has championed both innovative and legacy choreography, supported the work of artists across the field, and brought critical attention to the art form. Her latest dance, In the Wake of Yes, was noted as "powerfully animated, positively fizzy, full of droll wit" (Fjord), “The piece blended dance, art, and language into a layered meditation on love and emotional vulnerability." (Eye on Dance).
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
