MAJOR is a dance theater project—directed and choreographed by inaugural Gus Solomons Jr. Visiting Artist Ogemdi Ude—exploring the history and physicality of majorette dance with a team of Southern Black femmes embodying the movement of their girlhood. The piece preserves, transforms, and continues majorette legacy by integrating majorette movement, documentary theater, a live marching band, and an online interview-based archive. Through investigations of physical memory, sexuality, and sensuality, MAJOR preserves and proliferates the creative practices and stories of the folks who taught the team how to be proudly Black and proudly femme.
The Gus Solomons Jr. Visiting Artist Series is a new initiative that brings a contemporary dance artist to the MIT Theater Arts program in order to share and create their work with students and MIT’s broader community. Selected artists will, in the spirit of both Gus and MIT Theater, exemplify openness, embody empathy, expand the contemporary performance world on a national and/or international scale, and bring their unique individuality to their work—inspiring others to do the same.
Ogemdi Ude (she/her) is a Black queer femme dance and interdisciplinary artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Center for Performance Research, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. As an educator, she has taught at The New School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and University of the Arts. She is a 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2024 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient, a Live Feed Residency Artist at New York Live Arts, and a 2024/2025 BAX Artist-in-Residence. She has been a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. Most recently, she has published a book Watch Me in a collection edited by Thomas DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press, and was named a 2025 Jerome Foundation Fellow.
