ABOUT US
Founded in 2011 by choreographer, scholar, and educator Dr. Ayo Walker, Ayo & Company (formerly LJ Boogie & Company) is a project-based contemporary performance collective that assembles artists according to the unique needs of each creative endeavor. The company made its debut in Brooklyn, New York, with appearances at White Wave's 11th Annual DUMBO Dance Festival and 9th Annual Cool New York Dance Festival before expanding its reach to performance venues and festivals across the United States.
In its early years, Ayo & Company developed works that examined issues of race, identity, social justice, and cultural perception through movement-based storytelling. Following a brief hiatus, the company reemerged in 2018 at the 5th Annual PUSH Dance Festival at ODC Theater in San Francisco, California, presenting the Bay Area premiere of Do Hashtags Make Black Lives Matter? The work continued the company's commitment to creating performances that challenge audiences to move from passive observation toward critical reflection and social engagement.
Since 2018, the company's artistic practice has expanded through Walker's development of Caricatureography, an original choreographic methodology that investigates how iconic literary characters can be presenced as dancing bodies through readers' interpretive experiences. Situated at the intersection of dance, literature, performance studies, and embodied research, Caricatureography explores how choreography can function as a form of reading, writing, and cultural interpretation.
Through this ongoing body of research, Ayo & Company has created and presented The Breedloves' Pas de Duke and its subsequent iteration, Jones'n, inspired by Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, as well as the multi-iteration development of Jadine's Son, inspired by Morrison's Tar Baby. These works and related scholarly presentations have been featured nationally and internationally, including the Black Art of Dance Festival (Sacramento, CA), Sacramento Dance Sampler Unplugged, We Create! BIPOC Legacy in the Arts Festival (Boston, MA), The BIG Muddy Dance Festival (St. Louis, MO), the National Dance Education Organization Conference, the International Association of Blacks in Dance Annual Conference, and Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church (New York, NY).
Today, Ayo & Company serves as both a performance collective and a creative research laboratory dedicated to advancing Caricatureography as an emerging choreographic practice. Grounded in Africanist aesthetics, critical inquiry, and interdisciplinary performance, the company's work invites audiences to reconsider how stories are embodied, interpreted, and transmitted through the dancing body.
