Friday, October 2 at 7:30pm
Reynolds Industries Theater
Run time: Approximately 50 minutes, with no intermission
The performance will feature special cameos from North Carolina Central University student dancers, and Thee Immortal Sting marching band drum line from Hillside High School.
A brief panel discussion will follow the performance. Click here to learn more.
Ogemdi Ude is a dance and interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at New York Live Arts, Kampnagel, The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, and for BAM’s DanceAfrica festival. She is a 2026 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists recipient, 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Choreography, 2025 Princess Grace Honoraria in Choreography, 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and a 2024 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. She has published a book Watch Me in a collection edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.
Choreography and Direction: Ogemdi Ude in collaboration with the performers
Performers: Jailyn Phillips-Wiley, Junyla Silmon, Kayla Farrish, Rochelle Jamila, and song aziza tucker
Dance Captain emeritus: Selah Hampton
Original Collaborator: Chanel Stone
Composer: Lambkin
Archivist: Myssi Robinson
Production Stage Manager: Tania “t” Saiz Perez
Lighting and Set Designer: Simean “Sim” Carpenter
Costume Designer: Celeste Jennings
Company Manager: Yasmine Raouf
Producer: Sara Pereira da Silva
Featured Collaborators: NCCU Repertory Dance Company
Featured Musicians: Hillside Drumline
The Chord Archive, developed in collaboration with artist, Myssi Robinson (who is both an archivist of MAJOR and Writer-in-Residence for the entire Platform 2026: Secret Gardens) is showcased alongside MAJOR performances, a physical and digital documentation of the creative process and personal historical accounts from former majorette dancers.
Jailyn Phillips-Wiley (Performer) is a Jersey bred, Brooklyn based freelance dance artist. While attending Rutgers University, Jailyn was blessed enough to work with her peers, Shannon Gillen/Vim Vigor Dance, Dawn Marie Bazemore, and Noa Zuk. She was awarded Mason Gross’ Majorie J. Turner award for outstanding choreography on her senior thesis and received her BFA in May 2020. In 2022, Jailyn joined Umoja Dance Company under the direction of Karen Love. Wiley’s professional experience also includes chameckilerner, KeiyaA, and Kashia Kancey, among others. Jailyn dedicates this performance to all her childhood friends that pushed her into dance battle circles. IG: @jaipeedubs
Junyla Silmon (Performer) is a New Jersey based movement artist originally from Canton, MS. She is a summa cum laude graduate from Montclair State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dance performance, minor in business administration, and certificate of entrepreneurship. Junyla has performed with the dance companies Freespace Dance, Accent Dance NYC, Susan Marshall & Company, and continues an ongoing work relationship with choreographers Stefanie Batten Bland and Kayla Farrish. She was also a performer in the final years of Punchdrunk’s “Sleep No More” in NYC, and most recently premiered in “FAIRYLAND: ETHER” by Alba Albanese and StoryverseNYC Inc. IG: @nyla.js
Kayla Farrish (Performer) is a creator, multidisciplinary artist, and performer in NYC. As a freelance performer she’s collaborated with Ogemdi Ude, Autumn Knight, Micah Watson, Danielle Russo, Kate Weare, Sleep No More NYC, Marjani Forte, Nicole Von Arx, Helen Simoneau Danse, Kyle Abraham/AIM and more! She has received Bessie Awards, Harkness Promise Award, NY Times Break Out Star, NEFA Project Grantee, and Ellis Beauregard Contemporary Dance Award. Her commissions include Limon Dance Company, ADF, Armstrong Now!, Harlem Stage and beyond. She creates live works, films, and collaborative projects with artists like Esperanza Spalding, Trixie Whitley, Moor Mother, and Melanie Charles. (She loves MAJOR!!!) IG: @fulloutfarrish
Rochelle Jamila (Performer) is a Brooklyn based performer, dancemaker, doula, ethnobotanist and herbalist hailing from Memphis, Tennessee. She has performed in works by Adia Whitaker, Jasmine Hearn, Beth Gill, Ambika Raina, and Reggie Wilson among others. Most recently, Rochelle was a touring member with Trisha Brown Dance Company, performing in iconic works such as Brown’s Set & Reset and Working Title. Rochelle’s practices imagine liberation and pleasure through human and ecological fertility, and her has been presented in New York City, Tennessee, Louisiana, and The Netherlands. Rochelle graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in Dance and a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In her free time she enjoys restorative yoga, studying ethnobotany, and hand-weaving. Rochellejamila.com
song aziza tucker (Performer) is a project based movement and writing artist wrapped up in the erotic, cathartic, and beautiful reflections of black femme aliveness and survivalhood. She obtained both her BFA and MFA degrees respectively at the University of the Arts under the direction of Donna Faye Burchfield. song has had the pleasure of working as a performer and collaborator with, jaamil olawale kosoko, Tommie-Waheed Evans, Niall Jones, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Ogemdi Ude, and Doug Varone, among others. Through all collaboration, song desires and commands a full pronouncement of a voluminous self impelled by black femme strategies for aliveness.
Lambkin (Composer) (she/they) Electronic R&B/pop music, modern dance, and Black futurism comprise Lambkin’s artistic vision: where the visceral meets the cerebral; where the natural enacts the synthetic. The musician, composer, choreographer, and director explores Blackness as the break that might rupture our attachments to Worlds, territories, and Man. IG: @biglillamb
Myssi Robinson (Archivist) is a Bessie award winning performer, multidisciplinary maker and caregiver from Powhatan lands / Richmond, VA. Robinson explores creative archiving, mixed-media marking + design, ritual curiosities and her own improvising body. Through photography, video poetry, visual art response and spirit-forward witnessing, she asks how archival effort can flirt with embodiment, collective processing, affirmation of being and the blurring of legibility. In all her working, Intuition and empathy play with maximalist instinct to give life to what comes. Gratitude to Carolyn and Darrin for her life and abilities to create freely within it. may we all heal. IG: @myssirobinson
tania “t” saiz perez (Production Stage Manager) is a queer immigrant dance artist and production stage manager based in Brooklyn, NY. They hold a BFA in Dance from the University of the Arts, where they served as Production Coordinator and Stage Manager from 2022 to 2024. In her freelance work, t has had the pleasure of working with BigKid Dance, Cannonball Festival, HIVEWILD, Kayla Farrish, Marguerite Hemmings, MICHIYAYA Dance, Ninth Planet Productions, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, and waheedworks. Currently, they are the Production Stage Manager for the BFA Dance Lab at Bennington College and Ogemdi Ude’s MAJOR.
Celeste Jennings (Costume Designer) is a costume designer and playwright who is so proud to be a part of the MAJOR team. Recent/Upcoming Costume Design include: Appropriate (Old Globe Theatre), Oh Happy Day and Pride and Prejudice (Baltimore Center Stage), Memnon (The Classical Theatre of Harlem at the Getty Center and Marcus Garvey Park), Rough Crossing (Resident Ensemble Players), Minor;ity (Women’s Project Theatre), Fat Ham (Huntington Theatre), and Furlough’s Paradise (Geffen Playhouse). Recent Produced Plays: Citrus and ‘Bov Water (Northern Stage). Recent Play Readings: Potliqka (Public Theatre) and Contentious Woman (PlayCo). Education: MFA in costume design from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She’s a current member of the Emerging Writer’s Group of the Public Theatre. IG: celestejenn_ Website: https://www.celestejenndesigns.com/
Sara Pereira da Silva (Producer) is a Fulbright alumnus with an MA in arts management from American University. She was the recipient of an INOVArt grant and has been involved in dance teaching and Arts Management for more than 16 years with experience in Macau, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Washington, D.C., and New York City. In February 2018, she joined Big Dance Theater as their Executive Director, where she has produced 6 different works that toured internationally. Silva is also a member of CIPA (Creative and Independent Producers Alliance), she joined Ogemdi Ude/MAJOR in October of 2024.
Yasmine Raouf (Company Manager) is a queer Egyptian-American writer and cultural worker writing on desire and the sense of place. Raised on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, they are consumed by the ways land, power, and queerness are present as we move, migrate, and create. Outside of artistic practice, Yasmine provides development, operations, and event production services as a freelance consultant for arts and movement spaces focused on alternative sources of funding and narrative strategies.
SPECIAL THANKS
I first want to uplift the majorette teams that have shaped my love for majorette dance: Alcorn State Golden Girls, ASU Stingettes and Honeybeez, Southern University Fabulous Dancing Dolls, Jackson State Prancing J-Settes, and so many more. These are the original stewards of the work and I am eternally grateful to strive towards and be inspired by the gifts their performances are to the world.
A huge thank you to the donors who helped fuel this work: Andrew Keese, Maria Bauman, David Drew, Fariha Islam, Tyler House, William Plunkett, K.B. Bradley, Genevieve Rogers Buchet, John Buchet, Campbell and Sarah Rogers, Meghann Trago, Fishwife, Becca Millstein, Brian Johnson, Jordan Lubkeman, Benedict Nguyen, Chukwuka Ude, Elizabeth Mott, Silda Wall, Ify Ude, Lee Evans, and Marion Spencer.
Another huge thanks to our original collaborators and thought partners: Noah Latty, Rochelle Jamila Wilbun, Dava Huesca, Symara Sarai, Kadiedre Henderson, and Runako Campbell.
To the loved ones who supported us throughout this 3.5 year process, and to all the Black femmes who see us, inspire us, and hold us. We are forever grateful.
FUNDING CREDITS
MAJOR was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. MAJOR is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.
The creation of MAJOR was supported in part by a commission from New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Residency program. The Live Feed Residency program is supported by Partners for New Performance. The presentation of MAJOR was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. MAJOR is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by New York Live Arts, On the Boards, Bates Dance Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, Duke Arts and NPN. MAJOR is also co-commissioned by Kampnagel International Summer Festival.
Residency and funding support from Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Danspace Project, Mercury Store, Center for Performance Research, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). MAJOR has been supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, MAP Fund, a Brooklyn Arts Council grant, the Dance Advancement Fund from Dance NYC, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, Harkness Foundation for Dance and a Support for Artists Grant from the New York State Council for the Arts.
This event is part of We the People: A Duke & Durham Initiative
Expand to learn more about the speakers.
MICHELLE LANIER is a renowned public historian, folklorist, filmmaker, and multi-genre author, rooted in the Black South.
A graduate of Spelman College and UNC-Chapel Hill, Michelle serves as the director of North Carolina’s historic sites, a constellation of 27 museum spaces, historic structures, and landscapes including the final resting place of Charlotte Hawkins Brown, spaces of witness to human bondage such as the State Capitol, Stagville, and Somerset, and the birthplace of Harriet Ann Jacobs.
A respected voice in the fields of public memory, Lanier has worked internationally to amplify the narratives of Black cultural expression and the material echoes of the U.S. South. As the conceptualist and director of The Harriet Jacobs Project, and through her larger work as a keeper of memory, Lanier bridges vernacular, artistic, and scholarly realms through the transformative power of place as witness. Michelle is a proudly unionized, adjunct fellow at the Department of African and African American Studies and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
Dr. Kristi Vincent Johnson is a Louisiana-born author, filmmaker, and choreographer working at the intersection of dance, film, and cultural storytelling. Her screen-based practice translates movement into narrative film shaped by collaboration, site-specific inquiry, and the lived experiences of Black communities.
Her dance films I Want to Ask the Trees and The Communion of White Dresses, inspired by the poetry of North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green, have screened at such festivals as the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, San Francisco Arthouse Film Festival, and the Tryon Film Festival. Johnson’s work has been recognized for its visual rigor and its commitment to community-centered storytelling.
In recognition of this collaborative ethos, Johnson was selected as a 2021 North Carolina Campus Compact Engaged Faculty Scholar and awarded a 2024 Choreographic Fellowship with the Trillium Arts Residency Program in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. She holds an MFA in Dance from Texas Christian University and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She currently serves as Assistant Professor and Director of Dance at North Carolina Central University, where she established the dance minor and founded the Repertory Dance Company, cultivating the next generation of artists through interdisciplinary practice and embodied inquiry.
Dr. Andrea E. Woods Valdés is the Chair of the Duke University Dance Program and artistic director of Souloworks/Andrea E. Woods & Dancers. She is a former dancer/rehearsal director of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co. She creates dances as contemporary African American folklore. Wood Valdés teaches Afro-contemporary, modern dance and dance/vocal/shekere work. Her creative process draws on blues, jazz, folk music, family folklore, and movement that reflects the African diaspora’s social justice and cultural experience. Her research focuses on embodied Black aesthetics and building Black audiences for Black women’s creative work.
Dr. Brittany J. Green (she/her) is a composer and performance artist. Described as “a creative force of attention-seizing versatility” (The Washington Post) and “cinematic in the best sense” (Chicago Classical Review), Brittany’s music works to facilitate collaborative, intimate musical spaces that ignite visceral responses. The intersections between sound, video, movement, and text serve as the focal point of these musical spaces, often questioning and redefining the relationships between these three elements. Brittany’s work engages sonification and black feminist theory as tools for sonic world-building, exploring the construction, displacement, and rupture of systems. Her research engages queer and critical race theory in musical analysis.
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