Baye & Asa: HotHouse

Directed by Amadi ‘Baye’ Washington and Sam ‘Asa’ Pratt, Baye & Asa is a company creating movement art projects. The duo met when they were six years old––their long friendship giving them the freedom and safety to constantly disagree and expand each other’s artistic capacity. Their brotherhood nourishes the evolution of their work and the physical aggression in their choreography is a representation of their political rage and a yearning to personally implicate themselves. Hip-hop and African dance languages are the foundation of their technique. With it, they build theatrical metaphors, interrogate systemic inequities and contemporize ancient allegories.

Coming to The Clarice in 2022-23 is the duo’s new work HotHouse. ​​HotHouse is a commentary on confinement, a dance/theater performance, a durational installation and an exploration of how our failed response to COVID-19 has unmasked the greater systemic failures of America. It interrogates how and why inequities that predated the pandemic–in healthcare, housing, education, incarceration–erupted at the center of our political discourse.