In the opening scene of Okwui Okpokwasili’s experimental one-woman masterpiece “Bronx Gothic” — an intoxicating blend of dance, theater and installation art — the writer, choreographer and performance artist stands, in a purple slip dress, twitching and jerking her nearly six-foot-tall frame. Her gestures fill the air with a strange hurt. She calls the movement “the Quake,” and it swells long before the audience enters the theater to find Okpokwasili, 46, already onstage and working herself into a maniac sweat with her back to the room. After almost 15 minutes, she turns to face the audience. For a moment, her body sways with exhaustion, and her dark brown eyes stare vacantly at the expectant faces that fill the black box. Then she moves to a small microphone and says, in an octave that telegraphs the ingenuousness of an 11-year-old black girl: “I want to share something with you.”

For such visceral performances, Okpokwasili was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the honor informally referred to as the “genius grant,” in 2018. It was an acknowledgment of her work pushing performance art past its limits in nonlinear, interdisciplinary narratives that incorporate, to astonishing effect, dialogue, sound, song, installation and movement. In March 2020, the artist will take a turn as guest curator for the Platform performance and exhibition series at Manhattan’s Danspace Project. Her own work highlights the interior lives of black women and girls contending with history, exposing the messy terrains of femininity and race without turning representation into clichés about black liberation or struggle.