Octavia's Brood: Riding the Ox Home
“...a part of that same tradition of black literature and art that unites past and present in unsparing dialogue...Its enduring strength and quality derives in no small part from its polyvocal narratives of friendship, community, struggle, resilience, and discovery.” – Andrew Sargus Klein, thINKing Dance
“beautifully conceived, consistent in its vocabulary and masterfully performed." –
Zvi Gothiener, Artistic Director, Zvi Dance
"I am still in awe...hours after the performance." - DC Metro Theater Arts
Octavia’s Brood: Riding the Ox Home (OBROH) (2015) is an immersive, site-expansive dance work inspired by the prophetic envisioning of science fiction author, Octavia Butler, and abolitionist, Harriet Tubman. OBROH is a liberatory space to explore the comingling of race, gender, otherness, ownership and story-telling wrapped up in Black women’s bodies. It borrows its title, Octavia’s Brood, from a collection of “short stories for social justice movements” co-edited by Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown. Like Imarisha and Brown’s anthology, OBROH is inspired by Octavia Butler’s use of “visionary fiction”, where science fiction is a foundation for imagining socially just worlds, inhabited by richly diverse protagonists. The dance leaps back and forth through time, landing between antebellum South of the mid-1800s to an unknown place at an unknown date in a foreseen future.