A compelling singer and dancer, Okwui Okpokwasili is a virtuoso who has charisma and magnetism to spare. Her powers were evident to Twin Cities audiences a few seasons back when she performed in Ralph Lemon's "Scaffold Room" at Walker Art Center. Her singing, with a bluesy undertow, was both beautiful and triumphant. Her movements and her delivery also were strong and compelling.
Okpokwasili brings all her gifts to "Poor People's TV Room," a piece she created with commissioning help from the Walker, where it opened Thursday as part of the Out There series. The work, both startling and rough, has elements of dance, storytelling and music.
Out There offers adventurous shows that run the gamut. Some pieces arrest you with their achievement and ambition. Others leave you mystified by their ideas. Both sentiments are true for "TV Room," a heady 90-minute show that takes place not so much in the Nigerian village where it is set, but in the wake of any major trauma.
In an interview in the program note, Okpokwasili said that the work was partly inspired by the kidnapping of schoolgirls in Nigeria and by the police killing of a young black man in Ferguson, Mo. Onstage at the Walker, she and three other women, all black, move about in various stages of upset. All are in their own world. When the show starts — and it starts before you enter the theater — there's a topless figure behind a cheap plastic screen who is fairly well-lit. She's agitated and dancing, as if trying to go somewhere. In front of the screen, there are other figures in silhouette.
One figure (Olivier-winning Thuli Dumakude) sits on one of two lawn chairs (the other remains empty, waiting). Another, a woman with upraised dreadlocks (Nehemoyia Young), does a stutter step, as if trying to go somewhere against hindrance.
A third figure (Katrina Reid), with short-cropped hair, is over at a setup that looks like a table but is a broadcast area. Soon, Okpokwasili, who was behind the screen, comes out and joins Reid. She nurses Reid's breast as the image is projected onto a TV screen.
The show flows as a collage of images and realms. These performers, evoking women across the world, are dealing with shell shock. Sometimes they hug, offering comfort. Sometimes one nurses or lashes out. There's mournful singing, irascibility, fright.
The evening also has scatological verbal abuse as Okpokwasili, playing a powerful older woman, tells Reid's character, playing a niece that has perhaps been rescued from horror, about her place in the world.
Then Dumakude tells stories, anecdotes really, about someone seeing Oprah's face on toast. It's funny and moving but ultimately sad. These women, in various degrees of stress and trauma, seek salvation and healing. Oprah cannot save them.
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