Walker Art Center’s 2024-25 season features Grammy winners and artists from Africa to Asia

Racial justice and blurring lines between performance and visual arts emerge as themes in the Walker Art Center’s 2024-25 performance season.

“There are four or five pieces that are pretty hard core, raising the continued oppression and seeking out Black joy and liberation in the face of ongoing discrimination and racism in this country,” said Philip Bither, performing arts curator at the Walker.

Encompassing both themes is “Tell It Anyway, 2024,” one of four Walker commissions and world premieres. The performance is by American choreographer and MacArthur Fellow Ralph Lemon, with whom the Walker has a 30-year history. Ten years ago, the Walker commissioned Lemon’s “Scaffold Room,” a radical reinvention of gallery spaces that “upended the way we think about where work should go and what work should be about,” Bither said. Five years ago, the Walker began working with Lemon to revisit the work. The Walker will also host Lemon’s moving image work, “Rant Redux,” created with multimedia artist Kevin Beasley.

Minnesota artists are featured throughout the Walker season, beginning in September with Douglas Ewart. He’ll be performing in the Liquid Music co-presentation of Moor Mother’s seven-piece ensemble in a U.S. premiere of “The Great Bailout.”

Local playwright Rachel Jendrzejewski gets highlighted as well, in her collaboration with WaxFactory’s site-specific piece “Traces,” traversing various locales across Minneapolis. Other Minnesota artists featured this season are Jess Pretty, curating Choreographer’s Evening, and Mathew Janczewski of Arena Dances, who will show the world premiere of his Walker-commissioned work, “Only the perverse fantasy can still save us,” in May.

This fall, also watch for the return of Belgian theater collective Ontroerend Goed, which takes on American democracy’s future with “Fight Night,” and Grammy- and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw’s performance with Sō Percussion, co-presented with Schubert Club Mix. Both performances are in October.

Nadia Beugré, from the Ivory Coast, brings an expanded version of a work the Walker presented in 2012, now titled “Quartiers Libres Revisited,” in November.

In December, Grammy winner Meshell Ndegeocello performs “No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin,” presented with the Dakota. “It’s kind of like a concert in the form of a gospel service with a lot of elements of jazz and hip-hop woven through,” Bither said.

During the Walker’s popular Out There festival in 2025, Edgar Arceneaux interrogates family trauma and histories of racial appropriation with puppets, disco and karaoke in “Boney Manilli.” The fest also features Autumn Knight’s Walker-commissioned world premiere, “New Work,” which probes boundaries between stage and screen; Jaha Koo’s “Cuckoo,” starring three rice cookers, presented with Theater Mu; and the sublimely audacious Forced Entertainment presenting “Exquisite Pain.”

March brings a slew of not-to-miss works like Nordic indie-folk trio Dreamers’ Circus, co-presented with Schubert Club Mix, and Shamel Pitts and his collective Tribe, returning for year two of a three-year engagement. Also in March, London-based jazz saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings plays the flute with a six-member ensemble.

Japanese performance artist Eiko Otake, who with Takashi Koma proved electrifying in past years, returns to the Walker in April with a new collaborator, Wen Hui. In their Walker-commission and world premiere “What Is War,” the duo reflect on postwar Japan and China’s Cultural Revolution.

Also in April, Pulitzer Prize-winning musician Tyshawn Sorey and his trio perform in two separate concerts. The second one will be with alto saxophonist Greg Osby. In May, experimental rock group Deerhoof celebrates its 30-year anniversary by playing one song from each of its 19 records.