Why Ogemdi Ude Encourages Others to “Forget How to Dance”
I teach an improvisation class called “Forget How to Dance.” In it, I ask participants to enter the unknown—to risk moving sensitively rather than sensibly. We embrace being “the worst dancer in the room”—breaking from technique, convention, and expectation to uncover what actually stirs us. Participants take a variety of approaches to this prompting. Some dance wildly, others sing, talk, eat, sit, write. In forgetting how to dance, participants realize their creative agency and reshape what it means to move distinctly and radically.
Dance has taken on countless ferocious, loud, and undeniably physical permutations in my life—performing at pep rallies with my middle school majorette team, thrashing my body out of sync with the music in the back corner of high school dances, doing my first floorwork sequences freshman year of college.
During my senior year of college, when facing my most severe depressive episode, dance left the studio and became my walks to group dialectical behavioral therapy and my messy medication schedule. After my first injury and bout with chronic pain at 24, dance became physical therapy—teaching while lying in constructive rest, signing up for and canceling Pilates classes. In my own creative practice, dance became the voice, game play, projections, sketches, and broken rules.
In these transformations, I step out of dance’s traditional conditions and become more engrossed in the value of movement—of shifting states, awakening the body, mind, and spirit, activating your presence and purpose in the world around you. Extending my definition of dance from the studio led me into an understanding of its wider permutations. Dance had to transmute to sustain me, my practice, and my impact. Dance became advocating for accessible creative spaces. Dance became deepening my connections to chosen queer and trans family. Dance became fighting for intertwined Black and Palestinian liberation. Dance became refusal—a pseudonym for resisting oppression, for practicing active care, for desiring better worlds for not only myself but my community.
I dance because I would hate to just dance—to limit my body and my spirit to performative physicality when we are actually poised for so much more, for existing in opposition to instruction in order to encounter purpose. So I encourage you: Forget how to dance.
