Wura-Natasha Ogunji and ruby onyinyechi amanze | The Dash

The Dash is a performance of two runners who race in slow motion for exactly one hour. The performance may be staged within an interior or exterior space: the fixed space of a room; an open plaza; tight city corridors; or from a start line to the finish. The spectators play an important role in this staged competition. As vocal timekeepers, they collectively signal the start time, the half-way mark, and crossing of the finish line.

In their embodiment of restraint and reverberation, collectivity and calm, the performers incorporate facial expressions, hand signals and other gestures as critical choreography and necessary glitch. This movement-language references and riffs from the archive and research of the African sculptures of the 1922 Venice Biennale; track and field competitions; and the languages of drawing shared by amanze and Ogunji.

The title of the performance–with its multiple meanings–offers an additional layer of poetic possibility to this endeavor. A dash is a quick run, a punctuation mark, and in Nigeria, a gift, or a bribe. Turning to the grammatical dash, the race could be conceptualized as break or interruption. Inviting separation from the usual rushing of time, the performance might also be read as the belaboured writing of a long run-on sentence.

Viewers witness the runners’ procession–also–as anti-procession. It is a refusal of winners, or the need to pick sides with movement happening as a method for embodying presence, enacting form and expressing feeling–together. Arrival at the finish line a strange, shared feat.

Partner
African Art in Venice Forum