Performers demonstrate the sometimes ostracizing and violent nature of today's online culture, while also presenting individuals who build or fight the systems it allows them to create and shape. 
The show opens with a gleaming light above a pitch black stage. 
Snippets of Spanish music and lighting changes move the piece forward.
The piece explores Butler’s <i>The Evening and the Morning and the Night</i>, in which a community from a future world struggles with a “hereditary ailment” that causes them to scratch themselves violently, even to the point of death. 
Communication freshman Lydia Henry performs in “Her Words Masquerades as Me.”
Onye Ozuzu’s “Her Words Masquerades as Me” pays tribute to Octavia Butler, an Afrofuturist. Afrofuturism incorporates genres like science fiction, historical fiction and fantasy with Afrocentrism and other non-Western readings of realities into a literary and cultural philosophy. Afrofuturism analyzes both the current struggles of people of color and historical events of the past.
Communication junior Anna Celeste Harrer solos in “With My Face to the Wall,” showing the exhaustive aspects of battling oppression.
In Jeff Hancock’s “Smear,” the show’s first number, dancers present a perspective on individuals’ "virtual selves."
Weinberg sophomore Michelle Skiba performs in Eduardo Vilaro’s “With My Face to the Wall.” The piece illustrates individuals' developing strength in the process of finding a way to fight oppression.
Photos by Virginia Nowakowski / North by Northwestern
Current Rhythms, this year's Danceworks show, opened Friday night in the Josephine Louis Theater. Guest choreographers Eduardo Vilaro, the artistic director of Ballet Hispanico in New York City, and Onye Ozuzu, a performing artist and current dance faculty member and Dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago, contributed to the diverse set of choreographic styles and techniques. The show also features new works from Northwestern faculty members Jeff Hancock and Joel Valentín-Martínez. It will run through next Sunday.