Interactive cello performance explores themes of offering and loss

On Friday and Saturday in Swain Hall’s Black Box Theatre, Okorie “OkCello” Johnson performed "Offering," a cello concert that was a part of the Process Series’ 2024-25 season. 

The name embodies Johnson’s central aim in this performance, which he said is to gift the audience with a shared musical experience. The performance deals heavily with loss, which alongside the show’s name, demonstrates how offerings can emerge from loss, Johnson said. 

Throughout the show, Johnson used audience interaction — something he said he did to create a unique listening experience — as he believes in storytelling that lives in truth and lived experience. 

The performance was divided into four distinct acts, “Improvisation Meditation,” “Offering,” “Co-Creation” and “Living Sound.” 

“Improvisation Meditation” was performed as a conversation with the audience, extracting the feelings, anxieties and sentiments into a looped improvisation. Audience members raised their hands, and Johnson took what they said and made a song by recording himself playing different layers and harmonies, thereby making a song influenced directly by audience response. 

The second act and namesake of the entire concert, “Offering,” consisted mainly of an interaction with one person in the crowd, where Johnson improvised a piece based on an audience member’s story. During the show on Friday, Caroline Kirolos, an MBA student at Kenan-Flagler Business School, shared a story of her grandfather, and Johnson built on her emotions to improvise a piece. 

Kirolos said that Johnson was able to incorporate many of the details about her grandfather that she shared with him, which brought her back to the joyful feelings she experienced with her grandfather. 

“Then there was a moment of sadness of when he passed away, and then he brought it back to that joyful again, because remembering him is not always sad, it's always happy too,” she added.

“Co-Creation” was a collaboration with a fellow improviser in the audience, Shana Tucker, a cellist, vocalist and close friend of Johnson. 

Lastly, “Living Sound” invited the audience to offer their vocals to the performance. 

“In a sense, it was kind of like he was letting us have a taste of the improvisation as well, and we were all collectively making music,” Helen Fu, a sophomore statistics and analytics major who attended the event, said. 

Johnson, who has been a solo cellist for about 10 years, was not always just a cellist. He has also been a teacher, a writer and worked in theater. He said that he encourages people to learn to be comfortable speaking for their mind and spirit through their instruments. 

“I want to be out there on that tightrope doing all that terrifying stuff and doing it in a way that isn't like, ‘Hey, look at me. I'm up here improvising,’ but that is doing it in a way that says, 'There's something really beautiful, and hopefully sacred, in this that I hope that you can either appreciate or maybe attempt,'” Johnson said. 

Johnson intends for his show to deliver a message of life: to embrace life as a courageous act and inspire people to be responsive to the little things in life. He hopes to create a novel experience that is unlike any other. 

He considers his performance to highlight a spiritual element and shows that there is a sacredness that connects humans to the parts of life that are often forgotten; having art is a way to find it again. 

As a part of the Process Series,  "Offering" allowed Johnson to create and explore innovative content and gave the audience a sense of what artists do to finalize their performances. 

“I hope that the audience feels like they’ve witnessed something special and that they are now a community, so that whenever they see people from this audience again, they’re like, ‘Oh my god, you were in that audience. Do you remember that? That was the craziest thing,’” Johnson said.

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