Remember when dance moved out of the conventional theatre spaces and onto the sides of buildings, rooftops, parking lots, and street corners?
Well, look out because here comes Nora Chipaumire’s “Dambudzo,” bringing a touch of deja vu with an African diasporic twist and more to BAM’s Next Wave. The piece is set to be performed on October 8 and 9 at 7pm at Roulette, followed by a conversation with Chipaumire and the “Dambudzo” cast moderated by Charmaine Warren on Friday, October 10 at 6pm at BAM Fisher.
“Dambudzo” is an extraordinary immersive experience that dissolves the boundary between audience and performer just as in traditional African cultures. Blending sound, sculpture, video, and live performance, Chipaumire constructs a vibrant, confrontational environment that challenges your idea of what dance performances should look like, those old colonial structures, while reclaiming space for African narratives and futures.
“Dambudzo” takes its name from the Zimbabwean writer and rebel Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987), whose work belongs to a powerful lineage of African radical thinkers like Steve Biko and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, creating a space where resistance and ritual meet. Born in Zimbabwe, what was then Southern Rhodesia, Dambudzo Marechera was an acclaimed novelist, short story writer, playwright, and poet who attended the University of Rhodesia (now University of Zimbabwe), the University of Oxford, received the coveted Guardian Fiction Prize for his autobiographical first book, “The House of Hunger,” and died at aged 35 of AIDS-related pneumonia, after living homeless for years. His life of rebellion is Chipaumire’s inspiration as she explains during an interview with the Amsterdam News:
ZDA: Tell us about “Dambudzo.” What should the audience expect?
nc: It’s really an immersive gathering — a sheneen, which is in itself its own thing. In Southern Africa, when you say ‘Shebeen,’ it’s a gathering; it’s a social place; it’s generally in somebody’s house; it’s most definitely illegal. There will be food. There will be beer. There will also be all kinds of profane things happening but there will also be all kinds of intellectual gatherings and conspiring.
ZA: At Roulette, there will be beer but no food, I understand, except food for the mind and soul. Tell us more about Shabeen.
nc: Shabeen, or in Shosha, my mother tongue, it’s Shabini. They are very popular in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Mostly they grew up in the urbanization as the colonial project started to build cities and turn us into laborers. They became places of refuge for Africans to gather in their own cadence, also they’re places where the revolution was thought of and being built. … But I go back to these gatherings again and again as potential places for our liberation. You know, in American tradition, the Black church became that place.
ZDA: And “Dambudzo,” the inspiration for this piece. Tell us about him.
nc: Dambuzo is both a person and a word. The writer, Dambudzo Marchella, lived fast, died very young, was a really deep unapologetic thinker who describes his house as a house of hunger, both because of the poverty of African life at the time and … the class nature of what the colonial project brought us and issues to do with the patriarchy, health, mental health, and the education system.
He ends up being thrown out of the University of Zimbabwe for revolutionary activities and ends up at Cambridge and Oxford and tries to burn those houses down. (laugh) He writes this amazing novella for which he is [acclaimed] quite a bit. There’s a kind of return to him currently in intellectual circles celebrating his audacity. So that’s what the public ought to expect, this kind of circular profane space for which the sonic … language, but in a specific way, there is sound, but then there is language, it’s spoken largely in Shona to be true to the kind of anti-state positioning of these spaces. So all that cacophony is what we’re inviting people to conspire with us and make merry. There will be joy!
ZDA: Is this a relatively new concept for you?
nc: You know, live art is what I’ve been doing for a very long time. We remove all the expectations of [a] proper society, so there are no chairs. Everybody ambles along and follows whichever corner of the house where there’s activity. There’s always some activity somewhere in the house, so we just try to encourage people either by light, by sound, or object. So, it’s not a program as such. It’s a session. It’s a jam session. It’s a gathering. It’s church. Yeah.
ZDA: What do you want people to come away with after they’ve experienced this? It sounds like the “happenings” that were popular here in New York decades ago in the late 1960s-early 1970s.
nc: Except this is not happenstance. It’s a very deliberate space, calibrated to touch the senses in certain ways — visually, aurally, the skin has to feel certain ways when you walk into it. It’s properly designed. I’m very much dedicated to the organization of space, the design of space to say what I want it to say. There [are] no chairs. A lot of people think it’s improvised. No. I actually detest improvisation. There’s intentionality. I mean, I don’t think John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, or any of those people were slackers. And I feel like the discourse around improv is so slack as to take away the work that artists who like to work in that way. So for me, it’s a Butch Morris kind of energy that I bring into the room.
What do I want people to come away with? I’ve been very much desirous of not being read within the Western canon or to be approached in this way that the global North kind of flattens everything and kind of consumes us artists. I want people to be thinking about what spaces of art making can be that are not informed by coloniality or imperialism or whatever power … which is why I conjure Dambuzo Maracella to work with me because even though he used the English language, he used it to say what he wanted. You know, nobody could think that Dambuzo was anything else. He was Dambuzo Maracella. He was not playing ball. I also want people to walk away with knowing what it is to commit to the world of ideas without necessarily aping the master’s language.
ZDA: So tell us a little bit about you so people get a sense of who you are and what your intention is for this program. I heard you say in one interview that you don’t like the language of ‘choreographer-dancer.’
nc: I’m a thinker. I’m a thinker who thinks through making, so that’s who I am. As a choreographer, I use my body to speak about life itself to speak about questions of justice. You know. That intuition towards what is just allows me to go to bed at night and wake up with enthusiasm and the joy to pursue these concerns world over. I’m trying in my 60th year to move away from simpler questions of race and gender because they diminish us, towards bigger philosophical concerns. What is life itself? What is a just life? I want to grow into that space of nature, the power, the integrity, the undeniability of mountains, of rivers, of the sun, the moon. And to live outside of the very extractive extortion that both capitalism and the English language force us to constantly be in a space where we’re defending ourselves. Yeah. It’s very humiliating and I have lived a long life of this humiliation as a female, as a Black [person], and as an African. I’m sick of it.
For more info, visit bam.org/dambudzo.