Ozuzu Dances

EMPAC Work in Progress: Space Carcasses
2024-04-23 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Studio 1–Goodman, 110 8th Street Troy, New York, NY, 12180, United States
Space Carcasses is a dance-based, interdisciplinary performance I conceived and direct to explore how built environments imprint themselves on the body—how architectures become skins we’ve shed, yet still carry. Using emergent technologies, I’m constructing a virtual composite of three geographically and historically linked sites—Savannah, Georgia; Réunion Island; and Northern Nigeria—each a node in the transatlantic slave trade.
Through 3D scans, audiovisual residue, and movement scores developed on-site, I animate these “space carcasses” with the dancing body, drawing from an Africanist worldview where time is circular, identity is spiritual, and dance is a primary technology of access to ancestry and communal memory.
The body, in this work, extends into space as exoskeleton, as container—dancing with, through, and against the architecture it once endured. Projections, spatial audio, and live performance will interface in real time, forming a ritualized re-memory of place.
Space Carcasses is not only an inquiry into somatic histories but a process of re-contextualization—a way to assert presence, power, and transformation through the enduring vitality of movement.

danceGathering Artist Applications Due
2020-01-31 | NY
ADCAI is now accepting applications from Chicago-based artists looking to join us in Lagos, Nigeria for danceGATHERING 2020! All applications as due January 31, 2020. If you are interested, please click HERE for details. Questions? Please contact Bridgette at bridgette@ozuzudances.com.

Project Tool Premiere
2019-09-28 18:00 - 19:00 | Sweet Water Foundation, 5749 S Perry Ave, Chicago, IL, 60621, United States
PROJECT TOOL is a dance and movement performance choreographed to enable the dancers to explore the relationship between mind, body, and tool—in part through the process of building their own dance floor as part of the performance. As the dancers investigate and engage to build a wood, sprung dance floor, they collaborate with tools as partners to the body. The actual, real-time making of the floor through sawing, hammering, sanding, and nailing has the effect of unearthing an improvisational landscape in which tasks, tools, and body all work together to form and inform the dance itself. As in jazz, the performance and the sound, in both composed and improvised scores, respond to one another in real time. The sound, designed by Damon Locks, likewise engages tools—drum machines, sampler, synths, and effects—to bend sound, form sculpture, and effect time through the air.

Bates Dance Festival
2019-07-15 - 2019-08-02 | Bates Dance Festival, Bates College, Lewiston, ME, 04240, United States
Technology of the Circle
Ozuzu and Onikeku are contemporary performance artists who approach improvisation through a shared transnational Africanness that is networked in the African Diaspora: Nigeria-US and Nigeria-France, respectively. This co-taught improvisational, process-based course is steeped in their respective understandings of Africanist aesthetics. Technology of the Circle will explore the circle as a structure for improvised group interaction: the circle of playground fights and politics of Brazilian Capoeira, of Jazz music, of B-boying/B-girling, of club culture cyphering and battling, of the swirling interaction of Aikido’s uke and tori, and of a salsa couple. The circle as it functions in human, social engagements will emerge as a foundational and fluid tool for the crafting of layered, powerful individual and communal performance. As a group, we will investigate a corporeal investigation based in West African dance Philosophy, an embodied philosophy that manifests multiple physical expressions, creating dualities and oppositions; an intentional double consciousness. We will work with contemporary dance movement, singing, writing, storytelling and drawing in an integrated process toward a group performance of improvised sophistication.

Project Tool @ The Ragdale Foundation
2019-05-20 - 2019-05-24 | Ragdale Foundation, 1260 Green Bay Rd, Lake Forest, IL, 60045, United States
The Project Tool team will be in residence at the Ragdale Foundation.

Project Tool Residency @ Dancing Grounds
2019-03-23 - 2019-03-31 | Dancing Grounds, 3705 St. Claude Avenue, New Orleans, LA, 70117, United States
The Project Tool team will be in residence at Dancing Grounds in New Orleans to prepare for the fall 2019 premiere. The Project Tool residency will occur alongside Dance for Social Change, Dancing Grounds‘ annual festival centered at the intersection of arts and advocacy efforts and driven by their high school dance company, DG Uprising. This year’s theme is Reclaiming Our Home: Gentrification and Displacement in New Orleans. As part of the festival programming, Project Tool will facilitate a workshop on Fri, March 29 that invites our community into their process and will engage the conversation of gentrification on a national scale. Their young artists in DG Uprising will also have an opportunity to witness a professional choreographic process which will inform their artistry and provide them with skills and training to further their artistic practice.

Touch My Beloved's Thought @ University of Wisconsin-Parkside
2019-03-21 | University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Kenosha, IL, 53144, United States
A live dance and music performance in honor of Charles Mingus’ album “Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, made in collaboration with jazz composer Greg Ward, and originally commissioned by Links Hall and Constellation. The work received the Black Excellence Award (2014-2015) for Special Achievement in Choreography by the African American Arts Alliance.

danceGATHERING 2019
2019-02-11 - 2019-02-24 | QDanceCenter, GLOVER HALL 4 Custom Street, Lagos, Nigeria
danceGATHERING is an annual Dance Lab and Anti-disciplinary Festival which takes place in Lagos Nigeria, it is co-curated by Qudus Onikeku, dancer, choreographer and artistic director of the QDance Center Lagos, and Onye Ozuzu, the Dean of the School of Arts, University of Florida USA.
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danceGATHERING is coming back bigger and better in 2019. For this third edition whose theme is AFROSPACETIME, expect a potpourri of dancers, choreographers, visual artists, thinkers, scholars, scientists, DJs, Ifa Priests, capoeirist, film makers, multidisciplinary artists, community organizers, chefs, curators, designers, photographers, performance artistes, writers, singers, emcees, drummers, musicians, producers, philosophers and other inclassable mutants. All coming from various cities in Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, South Africa, Eritrea, Benin republic, Senegal, Cameroun, Madagascar, UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Poland, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Jamaica, Dominica and various cities in the USA… and the list keeps expanding.
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This transatlantic gathering of AfroDiasporic and creative tribes, is going to be a unique experience on the African continent. The whole festival runs from 11th through 24th February 2019, with various laboratories and active collaborations. For international Guests who wish to attend the festival, our events will be open to the general public only from the 20th and ends with a massive street art intervention on 23rd and 24th February, which will see us close down broad street for the entire weekend.
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For visas, hotel bookings and travel plans, please contact us via hello@qdancecenter.com.

BDF/GIBNEY CONNECT
2019-01-07 - 2019-01-11 | Gibney, 280 Broadway, New York, NY, 10007, United States
Join Bates Dance Festival & Gibney for our 5th annual five-day winter intensive! Focused on inspired dancing and creative exchange, this intensive is designed for intermediate and advanced dancers and will include classes with teachers and other professionals of the field.
Limited Drop-Ins for Individual 11:00 am Modern and 1:30 pm Improvisation Available: $20
1:30-3:00pm Improvisation with Onye Ozuzu

Elevate Chicago Dance
2018-10-21 11:00 - 11:30 | Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington St, Chicago, IL, 60602, United States
AFRO+SPACE+TIME
Co-collaborators and co-performers: Onye Ozuzu + Qudus Onikeku
Musical Score Composer: Ben LaMar Gay
AFRO+SPACE+TIME is an improvisational performance with choreographer/performer Onye Ozuzu, Nigerian choreographer/performer Qudus Onikeku, and musician Ben LaMar Gay. Holding reincarnation as the existential foundation, the momentum of our gathering is a non- linear, cyclical relationship to time and a psychic, intangible relationship to space.

Touch My Beloved's Thought @ Links Hall
2018-08-26 | Links Hall, 3111 N Western Ave, Chicago, IL, 60618, United States
