About sweat variant
sweat variant is the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, partners in both work and life. Since 1996, they have worked at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art to create rigorous work that reaffirms the marginal as the true center through an exploration of Black interiority. Building gestural vocabularies and narrative frameworks concerned with memory and the instability of persona, they aim to construct a space of radical intimacy in which performers and audience are locked in mutual gaze, activating a critical space of wonderment, uncertainty, and mystery in which to see each other anew.
CBA Project
Threading Residency Support/Adaku Pt. 2 Support
CBA and L’Alliance New York have selected sweat variant as their 2026–2027 joint Fellow. The fellowship supports sweat variant’s program, the Threading residency, established to honor the late Georgiana Pickett, a pioneering figure in New York’s performing arts community. The residency recognizes artists who push the boundaries of live performance through work deeply rooted in rigorous movement research. Its central aim is to bring non-NYC-based artists into the city, enriching the local creative ecosystem.
The Threading fellows supported by this year’s residency program are Marcelline Mandeng Nken, a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, new media, text, and performance, and Thuthuka Sibisi, a composer, performance maker, and Lecturer at Yale University.
sweat variant’s upcoming performance of adaku part 2 at BAM is in association with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing The Line Festival.
Gallery
