The Museum of African Diaspora invited PhD Student Sidra Bell back for Black History Month celebrations. Her collaborative team will be performing a new version of "O-O-H Child" this Thursday, February 12, 2026 6-7:30pm. 

 

MoAD presents O-O-H Child, a performance rooted in M. Carmen Lane’s installation You Weren’t Ready for Mami Wata in the Bates Gallery, commissioned as a conceptual and spiritual fulcrum in UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe. Named after an idiom that holds recognition, warning, tenderness, and release in a single breath, O-O-H Child begins where language thins and embodied knowing takes over, unfolding through sound and movement.

‍Shaped by Lane’s interdisciplinary practice, which weaves together ancestral knowledge and cosmological imagination, the work approaches unbinding as an active relationship to inheritance. It draws on inherited capacities including agility, malleability, boldness, creativity, and strength, situating Black life within deep time and relational possibility. These inheritances are mobilized not to discard lineage, but to defy categorization and constraint through experimentation, play, and refusal. Lane is joined by Sidra Leigh Bell and Sophia Halimah Parker in an embodied inquiry into what becomes possible when inherited capacities are activated as tools for self-determination and unencumbered being, with costuming by Mark Eric extending the exploration across body, memory, and form. The evening begins with a conversation moderated by Key Jo Lee, offering space for reflection on lineage, concept, process, and emergence.

February 12, 2026 6-7:30pm

(San Francisco, CA)

Tickets Link

Bell was also invited as to be an adjudicator for the American College Dance Festival Southeast this month.