Artist Notes

Talking (R)Evolution One Artist At A Time: Nora Chipaumire

by Joan Frosch  

Historically, “‘Africa’ is an intellectual space that has been constructed in opposition to European civilization, whereby local African discourses have been domesticated under Western epistemological orders.”   If indeed Europe, or the West, is the “silent referent” or sovereign subject, against which everything, even dance performance is measured, Nora Chipaumire asks: “What is an African dancing girl to do?”  Nora is dancing within and against what she terms the “white frame within which contemporary dance exists /or is at least understood” and the frame quakes and splinters in her power. 

Her work Chimurenga, or struggle in her native Shona, speaks to the post-revolution trauma in Zimbabwe and what it meant to her to have been raised in what she terms the “civilized-apartheid system.”   Where a code of silence exists among some Zimbabweans, Nora enters to speak her truth, to give human depth and dimension to oppression and violence, and to examine what it means to have benefited from the deaths of those who fought for freedom before her. 

As she moves to heal the inner and outer wounds of her youth and her homeland, the political situation in Zimbabwe has only deteriorated.  In response, her artist’s voice has grown louder, more compelling, more urgent—and her dancing fiercer.  Nora has become a veritable fortress of contemporary dance as demonstrated by her 2007 Bessie Award “…for a towering, incandescent presence and for raising the bar to celestial heights for her full-tilt performances.”  Her towering, incandescent presence simultaneously extends its reach deep into self and well beyond the notion of the isolated solo artist.  In fact, her deeply biographical work encompasses a range of people, personalities, layers of politics and histories, and memories, many of which appear to include images of women who have, or could have, shaped her past and/or her present.  She also draws deeply upon literature, film, and music of African artists: for example, Va Thomas Mapfumo’s Chimurenga music is a constant source of inspiration.  

Nora situates herself squarely within an African contemporary context, and like Ousmane Sembene, she sees Africa at the center, and Europe at the periphery.  Nora says: “I agree and I accept, Africa is my center; Zimbabwe is my focus.” Yet gender is critical for her, as well.  As an “African female dancing,” she has stated that she is in the production of a personal aesthetic, grounded in the “now” of what it means to be a Zimbabwean woman.  Nora states that she is working in a play of “…gender, shadows/light, space, time, force, objects, spirituality, nudity, shaven head, voice, text and the gestures of solo dancing, choreographing identity and agency.”

Chimurenga is a three-part work, and at Bates Nora will perform section two, entitled “Convoys, Curfews and Roadblocks” (2004).  She describes the work as follows:

During the height of the revolution the Rhodesian armed forces took to escorting its citizens (white - blacks were not considered citizens) along national highways.  Convoys, sometimes two miles – long, became our clock for they came without fail, every morning, noon and evening. We rose with the morning convoy, we knew when to take lunch break with the noon convoy and when to quit working the fields with the evening convoy. In the urban areas, 6am- 6pm curfews were imposed, with blackouts at 6pm to mark the beginning of the curfew. Roadblocks were set up frequently on major roads connecting towns/townships and tribal trust lands or kumusha (rural areas). Of the three, roadblocks were the most nerve wrecking; one’s life was in the hands of the soldiers at any given stop. Chitupas/identity cards had to be on your person at all times.  Not having one meant that you could be accused of being a terrorist! (Freedom - fighter to the blacks).

Nora’s Chimurenga provides a window onto critical postcolonial processes of artistic production. She clears space for emergent choreographic practices unencumbered by earlier models, which may not adequately serve urgent political art forms such as hers. Her creative imperative projects, translates, and interprets the often otherwise unimaginable.  As such, she is the experimentalist whose “…cognitive purview and social action range over multiple, if not countless, sites and locales” positioning herself as a fully enfranchised agent/expert who not only takes leadership in the discussion of her work, but also stimulates deeper conversations about dance in contemporary global practices.  When an artist such as Nora claims such power, contemporary dance benefits substantially, particularly in arenas where voices and histories have been muted or hidden from view. 

In addition to the obvious appeal of Nora’s erudition and fearlessness, both onstage and off, I am drawn to her work for a personal resonance, as well.  Nora is featured in the documentary which I produced and directed, Movement (R)Evolution Africa: a story of an art form in four acts, which tells the stories of nine powerful continental choreographers.  She is the performer/choreographer of my most recent production, nora (commissioned by EMPAC of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and directed by Alla Kovgan and David Hinton), a danced exposition her formative years from her birth in Mutare, Zimbabwe 43 years ago until her graduation from law school in 1989, when she began her continuing self-exile in the United States.
             
Nora is currently developing a dance and music conversation with acclaimed Zimbabwean musicians Thomas Mapfumo & The Blacks Unlimited, entitled lions will roar, swans will fly, angels will wrestle heaven, rains will break: gukurahundi.  She is deep in exploration of the creative ground of this most recent collaboration that will unfold during 2008-2009—stay tuned for what is sure to be an extraordinary new phase of her creative story.

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Endnotes

Castaldi on Mudimbe in Choreographies, 34.
Chakrabarty, Postcoloniallity,” 1992:2.
Holmes and Marcus, “Refunctioning,” 1044.
Frosch, Movement R(e)Evolution. 2007

References      
Castaldi, Francesca. Choreographies of African Identities: Negritude, Dance and the National Ballet of Senegal. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh.  “Postcoloinality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?,” in Representations, No. 37, Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories (Winter 1992), pp.1-26.

Frosch, Joan. Movement (R)evolution Africa: a story of an art form in four acts.  University of Florida Foundation. Gainesville, Fla., 2007. www.movementrevolutionafrica.com

Holmes, Douglas R. and George E. Marcus. “Refunctioning Ethnography: The Challenge of an Anthropology of the Contemporary,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds. N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2005.