Ogemdi Ude is known for interdisciplinary works that excavate grief, tunneling through despair in search of joy. But her first dance love was the spectacular showmanship of majorette teams. Growing up in Atlanta, she admired the majorettes at local football games. In middle school, she immersed herself in majorette dance, which was created by Black women and femmes at historically Black colleges and universities. 

Ude’s MAJOR revisits that early passion. A collaboration with six dancers and the musical artist Lambkin, the work—making its North American debut at New York Live Arts January 7–10 before touring—considers majorette dance from both a sociopolitical and a personal perspective.

How did your childhood experiences inspire MAJOR?

Majorette dance taught me the importance of community building. It asks you to be disciplined, not just for yourself but for the team—for the cause of unison, which is so compelling. It was the first thing that I felt like “This is my realm.” 

I was always in awe of the practice, even when I was doing it. There was fear, too, rooted in that reverence, and a deep desire for belonging. Majorette dance can be very exclusionary, and if you don’t make the team, you can’t really learn it rigorously.

I fell away from majorette dance when I went to boarding school and college. But a few years ago I started to come back to it. A lot of my work deals with nostalgia, and here was this both new and old challenge.

Your rediscovery coincided with a moment when majorette dance was getting more mainstream attention. 

Yes, and I see the desire and the beauty of everyone wanting to engage with it. But I also understand that people who went to historically Black colleges want to hold on to things that feel specific and rare to them. A huge part of this work is diving into “What does it mean to perform Black cultural artifacts outside of their original context?”

The people involved in MAJOR, we always say, “We’re a team, but we’re not a majorette team.” A majorette team is really specific to HBCU campuses. We’re working with majorette form and ideas, but we don’t get to be a majorette team. 

What research did you do?

A lot of writing and reflection. Watching a lot of videos. All of these majorette teams have their own languages—the Prancing J-Settes of Jackson State give a very different energy than the Southern University Dancing Dolls. I wanted to start to learn each language, and I was looking for the physical throughlines you see in all of these styles.

I worked with an archivist, Myssi Robinson, to figure out which elders, which stewards of the form to talk to. And we would go to homecomings and football games to make sure we were seeing things in person. 

What did the in-studio process look like?

The cast is a mix of people who are from the South—who had experience with majorette dance either when they were younger or in college—and then people who have just revered it from afar. All of them have contemporary dance backgrounds. So it was about seeing how majorette dance reorders your body, and what your physical instincts are when you’re trying to create something new using that form. 

MAJOR premiered in Germany last summer. Has it evolved since then?

We were embraced by the German audience, but they don’t really have an understanding of what majorette dance is or the communities it comes from, so the show felt like an introduction. In the U.S., people have more context, so we can get into the nitty-gritty. Instead of just showing you what majorette dance is, I’m going to show you what it does to me.

You describe the piece as both an investigation and a love letter. How do those two modes coexist inside it?

The investigation is about: Can you return to an older version of your body? How do you have to rearrange your current self to do something that felt good when you were younger? And can it do the same thing for you now, or new things? 

The love letter is to the Black femmes that I get to work with, and to the femmes who started this form—people we hold up as giants. Making MAJOR helped me pay attention, deeply and with a caring eye, to what it means to forge Black femme community.