Dambudzo

Overview

In this immersive anti-genre performance, “rock star of dance” (The New Yorker) nora chipaumire invites audiences into a world of sound, painting, sculpture, and performance.

On the FringeArts stage, chipaumire uses large-scale plastic paintings to construct a Zimbabwean shabini—an informal bar set up in private residences, where citizens gather to invoke the possibilities of resistance and insurrection.

Audiences freely explore this space populated by musicians, revolutionaries, tricksters, and sellouts, scored by a sonic backdrop of whirling Zimbabwean music and the threat of barking dogs.

Invoking the many meanings of dambudzo—the Shona word for trouble—and the radical ideas of African thinkers including Dambudzo Marechera, this thrumming, resonant work resists categorization, creating a space for an affecting confrontation of colonialism.

“Dambudzo is a name, a desire, a lament, an inspiration, even a loathing—a poem—that speaks to the 1980s before the fall of communism and the end of apartheid.” nora chipaumire

“An artist of tenacious intensity” —New York Times

DAMBUDZO is a commission of Wiener Festwochen and Festival d’Automne à Paris, produced by nora chipaumire, and developed in residency with Callie’s Berlin.

SUPPORT

Funded by the Visual Arts Project Fund of the Goethe-Institut.
nora chipaumire inc. is supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Icon Producers
Mark and Tobey Dichter
Co-producer
Nancy Lanham

Photo: Guto Muniz

About the Artist

nora chipaumire was born in 1965 in what was then known as Umtali, Rhodesia (now Mutare, Zimbabwe). She is a product of colonial education for black native Africans — known as group B schooling — and is invested in knowledge acquisition and sharing outside of prescribed parameters.

Credits