sweat variant’s adaku, part 2 will make its world premiere at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, October 20–22. Performances are scheduled for 7 p.m. each night, and the work runs about 90 minutes without an intermission, according to Columbus Underground. The Hey, Fred! newsletter lists the venue as the Wexner Center Performance Space, 1871 N High St., and member tickets starting at $35.
A new chapter in the trilogy
The Wexner Center’s event listing says the second installment can be seen on its own; audiences need not have attended the earlier work. The center describes the trilogy as a speculative mythology about a family in precolonial West Africa whose history is affected by the transatlantic slave trade. In its work-in-process listing, the Yale Schwarzman Center places the new chapter in a near-future United States and describes its subject as the effects of the slave trade’s historical rupture on people and communities. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston describes a young woman who is told she has no history worth remembering and whose experience raises questions about ritual and repair.
The first installment, adaku, part 1: the road opens, was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in May 2023 and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that November, according to sweat variant’s archive. The Wexner Center’s listing identifies the Aspen Art Museum, the Wexner Center and the Yale Schwarzman Center as lead commissioners. It also credits the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
Conversation and later engagements
A postperformance conversation moderated by Wexner Center Curator of Exhibitions Rebecca Lowery is scheduled after the Wednesday, October 21 performance, according to the center’s event information. A Wexner installation connected to embodied memory is also part of the presentation.
The Wexner Center’s campus role
The Wexner Center opened in 1989. Its strategic plan describes the center as Ohio State’s multidisciplinary, international laboratory for contemporary art.
The work is also scheduled for performances at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and the Walker Art Center.
