Decolonising Perspectives on Histories – nora chipaumire and Contemporary African Choreography

Multiple award-winning artist nora chipaumire (born 1965 in Umtali, Rhodesia, today Mutare/Zimbabwe) is one of the most prolific voices of contemporary choreography from the African continent. Her multidisciplinary work trips up racialisation and gender stereotypes in postcolonialism through dense citational layering of African positionalities. In doing so, chipaumire underscores native African history and heritage. As she grew up when Zimbabwe was a British colony, chipaumire takes stand for her personhood as a Black African woman and has learned how vital it is to fight colonialism through art. As a result, her artistic practice commits firmly to her culture, Shona, which is part of the South African ethnic group Bantu.

Choreographic rescripting of dance canon as method of unsettling and archiving: The Dark Swan (2005–2020) and Rite/Riot (2013)

After completing two MA degrees, one in dance and the other in choreography and performance at Mills College, USA (1998–2002), chipaumire’s international career took off from New York, where she danced in 2003–2008 in the Black Woman+ Urban Bush Women Dance Company. In parallel to the company work, chipaumire started to explore critical questioning of colonial history and power, for instance by engaging with two canonical works of dance history over several years (2005–2018): Vaslav Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913) and Mikhail Fokine’s The Dying Swan (1905).[1] chipaumire rewrote The Dying Swan, originally performed by a white dancer, into a solo danced by herself entitled The Dark Swan (2005). She responded to the group work The Rite of Spring through her solo Rite/Riot (2013).

The Dark Swan has had multiple reiterations since its premiere in 2005. chipaummire adapted her solo to a group of nine men in 2010 and moulded The Dark Swan into a choreography for 23 women students in 2013. In 2015, the Urban Bush Women Company performed another articulation of the original work. Dance scholar Ananya Chatterjea suggests that the insisting process of remaking is a “postcolonial strategy of haunting or refusing consolidation […] an intentional practice of rejecting different narrativisations of status quo”.[2] As a postcolonial method, remaking allows chipaumire to undo European dance heritage by inserting her positionality as Black African Woman. This results in choreographic interpretations that avoid simple antagonisms but rather address ongoing lines of tension in the process of re-writing. The repetition-with-difference of The Dark Swan, over 15 years, could also be understood as a decolonial effort of delinking from hegemonic forms of knowledge. chipaumire’s continuous remaking of The Dark Swan then undergirds the situated knowledge of the Black body’s ways of “speaking”, moving and dancing. The emphasis on the Black African body recalls chipaumire’s strong bond with Shona culture, producing embodied cultural heritage. As the cultural theorist Aleida Assmann reminds us: “Indigenous memory cultures hand down their cultural heritage in a completely different way. […] The body itself is the archive; in the body and through the body the tradition that is important for the group is inscribed, performed, preserved and passed on”.[3]

In Rite/Riot (2013), a collaboration with the Nigerian American writer Teju Cole and Kenyan American visual artist Wangechi Mutu, chipaumire develops a performative reflection on sacrifice, sourced from chipaumire’s reading of The Rite of Spring. Her body, moving slowly, only dressed in underwear, put on display in a plexiglass cube, accompanied by a banner with the inscription Black African Body, evokes anthropological exhibition practices and museum displays of non-white humans prominent in 1913. In this manner, Rite/Riot ultimately challenges the colonial Western gaze and ongoing projections onto African female bodies.

Manifold choreographic articulations of contemporary Black African livelihoods

Like Rite/Riot, the duet Miriam (2012) performed with Okwui Okpokwasili, which references Miriam Makeba, a South African performer and activist in anti-apartheid riots, rethinks and resists the commodification of female “enfleshed Black existence”.[4] chipaumire’s and Okpokwasili’s broad range of movement entails different walking and stamping patterns that sit at times with aggression in the space, combined with different vocal articulations of text (for instance excerpts of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) and rawer forms of voicing. They activate the scenography of Olivier Clausse by different actions, whether sitting on the industrial-looking constructions or being covered by them. The overall residue of the work lies in the power of chipaumire and Okpokwasili owning definitions of Black African femininity.

In her subsequent piece, portrait of myself as my father (2014), chipaumire continues on the subject of gender and portrait in dialogue with her earlier interest in the topic of sacrifice, reminiscent of the exploration of The Rite of Spring. In portrait of myself as my father she investigates the male African body via the figure of her father and his absence during her childhood: “As Stravinsky/Nijinsky suggest in their monumental work The Rite of Spring, is the sacrifice of a human being limited to primitive societies? I believe that in Africa, the sacrificial offering has been the Black African male, and not the young female virgin.”[5] Placed in the context of a boxing game, in collaboration with the Senegalese American performer Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye a.k.a. Kaolack and Jamaican American performer Shamar Watt, chipaumire performs a fictionalised character of her father. Sport is here the avenue for Black masculinity to define itself, or as chipaumire says: “Using sports as a space where you can make yourself, you can build yourself. And again, I am building an image out of a colonial space.”[6]

chipaumire’s constant quest for justice and deep entanglement with the Shona cosmology is also expressed through her 2022 five-and-a-half-hour opera Nehanda, originally produced for radio in 2021. The opera celebrates the Shona spirit medium and leader of the revolt against the colonial British South Africa Company in 1889, Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana, and acts as a reminder to keep addressing neocolonial oppression. In the programme note, Nehanda is announced as “a juridical opera, taking up questions of jurisprudence in defence of the native freedom fighters murdered by the British South African Company (BSAC) on behalf of the British Empire and Queen Victoria in 1889”.[7] Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana was sentenced to death in 1889, and her physical remains have not been returned to Zimbabwe yet. In Nehanda, a fulminant immersive space with a cast of 20 performers, dancers, musicians and singers, chipaumire articulates an insistent claim– as she sings–speaks through her live performance – “we want our bodies back”, to decide in own terms, that is African terms.

Audience space and performance space also merge in chipaumire’s latest anti-genre work, the durational performance Dampudzo (2024) – in Shona, trouble – premiered at the Wiener Festwochen 2024. The work incorporates sound, sculpture and dancing where participants can freely roam: in a specially designed bar participants are asked to actively develop concrete plans for decolonial revolutions. Finally, chipaumire has made several short films. Not Waiting (2023) was co-authored by her long-term artistic dialogue partner, the Senegalese dancer, choreographer and pedagogue Germaine Acogny. The point of reference for Not Waiting is the Senegalese Lébou people’s exorcists’ healing ritual Ndeup, where woman play a central role.

It is impossible to cover chipaumire’s entire body of work in this short article, but it is important to note that its richness reflects chipaurmire’s deep curiosity to experiment with artistic media and formats.

Movement language, voice, audience as decolonial choreographic strategies

chipaumire activates the physical language she researches through her decolonial movement practice, Nhaka. Nhaka is physically and spiritually anchored and sourced from the indigenous practices of Shona animism, such as the heritage of totems, and the spiritual contact with ancestors and spirits. As in many African dance traditions, central to Nhaka are the feet of the dancer as a means to allow swift weight shift and let energy, from the ground up, travel via the pelvis through the whole spine. Within that framework chipaumire emphasises her devotion to addressing the colonial past and present. In Nhaka dancers are asked to place the Black Power gesture (right arm raised, hand in a fist) as a measure of space between the dancers’ feet. The symbol of resistance turns into a way to measure the just space that the body moves in. From that place, the performers and chipaumire herself start engaging in different walking patterns that alternate in velocity to generate what Chatterjea has called “a snapshot of Black life under imperialism encompassing empowerment, devastation and resistance”.[8] Having worked in radio and as a DJ during her law studies at the University of Zimbabwe (1986–1989), she has developed a particular sensitivity to sound and music. A great example of this devotion was expressed most acutely in her 2018 trilogy #PUNK 100%POP *N!GGA.[9]

Also, chiapumire choreographies centre a commitment and valorisation of vocal expression in the form of singing and speaking, which adds to her works’ vibrant acoustics. The voice is equally a keystone in law-making: the reading of a verdict, the hearing of testimony and the sounds produced through emotional bursts in the courtroom. Such “acoustic jurisprudence”[10] echoes chipaumire’s work insofar as, simultaneously to its strong visuality, it fathoms sonic imaginations that transport account of colonial violence and resistance. chipaumire uses the space of performance as a space for advocacy, reminding her audience that there is still much work to be done so that decolonisation does not remain a metaphor.[11]

The pervasive nature of sound produces an invitation for the audience to immerse themselves in the work and become participants in it. As chipaumire prefers to call her artistic collaborators corroborators, she asks the audience to coactivate the space, and to be swayed. Spectating or being a distant audience member is out of the question. Attending chipaumire’s shows, one needs to choose a side.

Conclusion

nora chipaumire’s relentless decolonial artistic queries have led to a plentiful body of work carving out notions and practices of contemporary dance and choreography from a Black African perspective – to mention all her activities would go beyond the scope of this article. It is vital to remember that besides extensive international touring, chipaumire is equally invested in creating spaces for other artists to come together to practice decoloniality, such as through the female-run cultural space nhereraHUB in Harare, Zimbabwe, with its radio station that chipaumire heads. Finally, chipaumire’s rich pedagogical engagements in different dance schools around the globe include a powerful bond to the Senegalese School École de Sable, directed by Germaine Acogny, where she regularly teaches a younger generation of dance artists. chipaumire’s fierce sense of artistic experimentation and her social and political advocacies are potent grounds for countering the Global North’s cultural supremacy and to keep on pushing for a more just world.

Notes

1 Järvinen: A Cultural History of Ballet – Five Centuries of a European Art Form.

2 Chatterjea 2020, 193.

3 Assmann 2024, 197.

4 Bradley 2023, 92.

5 www.companychipaumire.com/touringwork.

6 How nora chipaumire choreographed portrait of myself as my father, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGNywmwWX9g&t=17s. 16:05–16:18, accessed 12.10.2024.

7 nora chipaumire. Nehanda. issuu.com/montclair210/docs/nora_chipaumire_nehanda, accessed 13.10.2024.

8 Chatterjea 2020, 127.

9 DeFrantz: Black Sensibilities – Contemporary Dance of an African Diaspora.

10 Parker 2021, 22.

11 Tuck 2012.

Literature

Assmann, Aleida. 2024. “Archiving the Body – Cultural Memory and the Practice of Intangible Cultural Heritage.” In Klein, Gabriele, Fanz Anton Cramer (eds.) Materialities in Dance and Performance. Writing Documenting Archiving. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

Bradley, Rizvana. 2023. Anteaesthetics Blacks Aesthesis and the Critique of Form. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Chatterjea, Ananya. 2020. Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Parker, James. 2021. “The sound scape of Justice.” In LaBelle, Brandon. Acoustic Justice, New York: Bloomsburry.

Tuck, Eve, Yang, K. Wayne. 2012. “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” In Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Science 1(1).