sweat variant / Okwui Okpokwasili & Peter Born
my tongue is a blade
US premiere
Dance / Installation / Visual Art
my tongue is a blade is a three-hour movement performance-practice that is a work with relation, memory, and reflection. It asks: What are the limits of our attention and how does that test the strength of our bonds? Four performers commit to remembering each other, holding each other, bearing each other, and sustaining the world that contains them. This rich visual and sonic landscape is an invitation to the audience to witness this practice and resonate within it.
my tongue is a blade will be performed by Okwui Okpokwasili, Bria Bacon, Kris Lee and AJ Wilmore.
We are interested in building a spectacle of radical intimacy, where both performers and audience are acknowledged as being locked in a mutual gaze. We build gestural vocabularies and narrative frameworks that are concerned with the problem of memory in the inherent instability of the construction of a persona.
We hope to activate a space that allows the audience to question who they are looking at and how they are looking. We hope this creates a critical space of wonderment, of uncertainty and of mystery. It is in this space that we believe we can see each other anew.
Performance details: This is a 180 minute durational piece – We encourage audiences to come and go throughout the piece. Entry is rolling through the duration of the installation, and space is available on a first-come, first-served basis with two slotted entry times. Guests are welcome to arrive any time at or after their ticketed admission and stay for as long as they like.
The Dark: PS21’s fearless winter festival of live performance radiating across Columbia County
The Dark is a new annual festival from PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance that celebrates and elevates the depths of winter. Taking place February 16–22, 2026, the festival will unfold at PS21 and across Columbia County—in theatres, restaurants, libraries, saunas, and outdoor public spaces. Featuring more than 60 international artists and over 80 performances, The Dark offers a packed week of world-class contemporary performance, installation, music, dance, and theatre—all exploring winter as a time of community and solitude, fire and ice, darkness and light. A major new attraction for the region, the festival positions Columbia County as a year-round cultural destination—not just a summer one.
It is a light in the dark—and The Dark is the light.
Secure your Festival Pass to The Dark now which includes tickets to every performance along with a complimentary sauna and ice skating session!
Director – Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born
Performers – Bria Bacon, Kris Lee, AJ Wilmore
Dramaturg – Katherine Profeta
Set designer, sound design, & costume design – Peter Born
Producer – Annabel Heacock
Production advisor – Michaelangelo DeSerio
Commissioned by the Irish Museum of Modern Art as part of Take a Breath, with support from the Sam Gilliam Foundation. Support for sweat variant is provided in part by the Mellon and Howard Gilman Foundations.
Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performer, actor, choreographer, and writer. Okpokwasili has earned numerous accolades, including a 2025 Art Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. Okpokwasili was the 2015-2017 Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist. She was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA in 2022, and an artist in residence at the Brown Arts Institute in 2023. She continues to collaborate with Ralph Lemon, Kevin Beasley, Saidiya Hartman, and Kaneza Schaal, among other artists.
Peter Born (he/him) works as a director, composer, and designer of performance and installation, often in collaboration with Okwui Okpokwasili. He co-created The Venus Knot, he his own mythical beast, and VESSEL with David Thomson. His set design work with Nora Chipaumire includes rite/riot and El Capitan Kinglady. His work as an art director and prop stylist has been featured in video and photo projects with Vogue, Estee Lauder, Barney’s Co-op, Bloomingdales, Old Navy, 25 magazine, The Wall Street Journal and No Strings Puppet Productions. Born is a former New York public high school teacher, itinerant floral designer, corporate actor-facilitator, video maker, and furniture designer.
Bria Bacon is a performing artist, predominantly trained in dance, holding passions and gifts in writing, theater, sound-making and singing. She has worked with Bebe Miller Company, Stefanie Batten Bland, ChameckiLerner, Wendell Gray II, Sally Silvers, Donna Uchizono, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Stephen Petronio Company, and Kyle Marshall Choreography, as well as Beth Gill and Rachel Comey in NYFW and Company Christoph Winkler in Berlin. Currently, she is working with Sweat Variant (Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born), Saidiya Hartman, and Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group, among others. All praise to the angels, ancestors, and folx within her village.
Kris Lee (she/they) is a New York-based dance artist, performer, and DJ. Most recently they have performed in works by Julie Tolentino, Kevin Beasley, Moriah Evans, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Ralph Lemon, Miguel Gutierrez, Andros Zins-Browne, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Shamel Pitts (TRIBE). They were a recipient of a 2024 danceWEB scholarship at ImPulsTanz under the mentorship of Isabel Lewis. Lee has shown work at Judson Memorial Church as part of Black Aesthetics and Cathy Weis Projects’ Sundays on Broadway. In 2025, she had the pleasure to be part of OO-GA-LA, the reimagining of Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones’ 1983 Untitled Duet At Danspace Project. They received their BFA in Dance from University of the Arts in 2019.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, on the land known as Lenapehoking, the ancestral home of the Lenni-Lenape people, AJ Wilmore is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer whose practice is shaped by questions of storytelling, identity, and the complexities of Black familial relationships. A 2020 graduate of The University of the Arts, Wilmore has performed in works by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Ralph Lemon, Joan Jonas, Isabel Lewis, and MBDance at venues including Brooklyn Academy of Music, Abrons Art Center, MoMA and MoMA PS1, Danspace Project, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Judson Memorial Church, and Snug Harbor Cultural Center. A 2025 Dancing While Black Fellow, Wilmore recently premiered their first experimental film, Untitled (434). Wilmore’s practice—driven by making love to her fears—investigates the stakes, texture, and vulnerability of her social and sexual life.
sweat variant is the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. Since 1996, they have been working at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art to make challenging and rigorous work that reaffirms that which has been deemed marginal as the true center through the exploration of Black interiority. Okpokwasili and Born are interested in building a spectacle of radical intimacy, in which both performers and audience are acknowledged as being locked in a mutual gaze. They hope to activate a space that allows the audience to question who they are looking at, and how they are looking.
Okpokwasili and Born have created the Bessie Award-winning pent up: a revenge dance and Bronx Gothic. The latter continues to tour internationally, most recently to the 2024 Milan Triennale. Other performances include let slip, hold sway, adaku, part 1: the road opens, Adaku’s Revolt, swallow the moon, Sitting on a Man’s Head, and poor people’s TV room, which also toured the US. Their work has been featured internationally, including at the Berlin Biennale, the Young Vic, and the Tate. Recent works include installations in the exhibitions Grief and Grievance, Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum (NYC), Witchhunt at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and Sex Ecologies at Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway. poor people’s TV room (solo) installation is in the Hammer Museum and Whitney Museum collections.
The Dark is supported through a Market New York grant, awarded to PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance from Empire State Development and I LOVE NY, New York State’s Division of Tourism.
Digital content coverage for The Dark is supported by Bloomberg Connects.
The Dark‘s business sponsors are Millay Arts and The Mountains Media.
Thank you to the many generous individual supporters who helped fund The Dark.
PS21’s programs are made possible in part with support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Please note that this performance has an unconventional seating, limited seats or standing room only. We are happy to accommodate any specific accessibility needs.
Please reach out to Adriana at boxoffice@ps21chatham.org, and she will coordinate with our front-of-house team to ensure your experience is comfortable and enjoyable.
