Profile
Aku Kadogo
313-993-8227
Biography
Aku Kadogo is a producer, director, choreographer, teacher, traveler and thinker. She has joined WSU as Director of the Black Theatre Program. She has had the opportunity in her career to produce works that challenge and blur boundaries. In October 2004 she devised a large-scale performance installation with Detroit-born artist Tyree Guyton for the City of Sydney’s “Art and About Visual Art” festival. Singing for that Country was collaboration with Mr. Guyton, 150 youth from the South Sydney area and the City of Sydney.She spent 1998 and 1999 traveling to the CentralDesert of Australia to research and create Ochre & Dust, an installation featuring Pitjantjatjara storytellers, commissioned by the Adelaide and Perth International Festivals 2000. This work also traveled to the South Pacific Festival in New Caledonia.Her performance work includes Frenzy for the 1998 Cultural Olympics’ “A Sea Change” festival, Sydney.In 2002 she was Artist in Residence at New YorkUniversity, GallatinSchool, where she lectured and performed in her own work, The Quilt. Her career has spanned stage, film and television. Kadogo settled in Australia after appearing in the original Broadway, Australian and Los Angeles casts of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf.She directed for colored girls… for the Black Theatre Program at WayneStateUniversity in 2002. Kadogo has just returned from China staging the Asian touring company of Rent. She has been an associate choreographer on Rent since 1998. Aku Kadogo is committed to making art: “where seeing and performing are linked, where there is no producing without learning and no scholarship without interaction; where creation entails community and community is incomplete without creation.” (Benjamin Barber/Jihad vs. McWorld)