nora chipaumire**
#PUNK
100% POP
*N!GGA
2018
Dance/Performance
funded by The University of Richmond
**Editor’s Note: The artist’s name appears in lowercase throughout this article in accordance with nora chipaumire’s preferred styling.
Born in 1965 in Umtali, Rhodesia (now Mutare, Zimbabwe), nora chipaumire is a genre-defying artist whose work challenges colonial legacies, identity, and institutional knowledge. A product of segregated “group B” education for Black Africans, she creates bold performances that fuse political urgency with radical aesthetics, as seen in her opera NEHANDA (2021), the installation afternow (2022), and the performance album *#PUNK 100% POP *N!GGA. A four-time Bessie Award winner and recipient of honors including the Guggenheim Fellowship and Doris Duke Artist Award, chipaumire continues to shape global performance through her residencies at NYU, Columbia University, and recent recognition with the Grand Prix de la Danse de Montréal.
In this photo essay of DIARIES I share with you the process I was able to document during nora’s residency at the University of Richmond in 2017 as she started to develop #PUNK.
I. Prologue: portrait of myself as my father
In order for me to talk about the process of #PUNK, I first have to tell you about portrait of myself as my father. Even if punk is not a direct conceptual heir, portrait was the very first piece of nora’s work I ever experienced.
I remember it distinctly—seeing portrait for the first time at the Dogtown Dance Theatre in Richmond, Virginia. It was a short stop after the company’s BAM tour in New York City. It was a short two-day run. I had zero context about nora’s work before that, but was lucky enough to get tickets for it.
The audience walked into this big dance studio/ multipurpose room. The space was dimly lit. The four corners of a makeshift boxing ring were delineated with fabric straps attached to posts—flimsy, movable. A couple of unasuming garage floor lamps sat haphazardly. Three performers, tethered to the ring and one another, were moving about. One of them wore a set of football shoulder pads and an African mask, giving them an unnaturally large and menacing silhouette.
From the beginning, I was taken aback by the energy emanating from nora. The violence of the performance, the sheer strength being projected outward—it was enough to freeze everyone in their tracks. I doubt everyone else was as uninformed as I was, but I could see it in their faces: we were all petrified. It was a strange combination of slack-jawed admiration for the athleticism and an intimidated, almost reverent, contemplation. The show didn’t let anyone off the hook.
The audience sat on all four sides of the ring, in single rows, no one to hide behind. The performers were constantly in your face, constantly moving around you. It felt like you were ringside in a deadly match, with blood splattering on you.
In the performance, nora fights the “ghost/memory” of her father. She examines his legacy, his becoming a man, and his position in her own life—her inheritance, in a sense questioning what part of him lives on through her.
portrait is perhaps the most powerful performance I’ve ever witnessed. It was so powerful that I had to come back the next day to see it again.
That was my introduction to nora’s work, her style, her technique, and her visuals—the messiness of the performance, and above all, the unflinching, direct connexion (and at times confrontations) with the audience. It truly changed my life.
About portait, the company website states:
“portrait… takes place in a simulated boxing ring in which Chipaumire and Senegalese dancer Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye, also known as Kaolack, are tied together in an exhausting and symbolic dance-ritual. They are joined by Jamaican-born, Brooklyn-based dancer Shamar Watt, who plays the coach/corner man/cheerleader/shadow.
In this performance, the spectres of the estranged father dance, struggle, and fight against prejudices, social pressures, the weight of traditions and history.The piece considers the African male through the lens of capitalism, Christianity, colonialism and liberation struggles—and how these political and cultural traditions impact the African family and society on a global scale. The imaginary daughter and father are tethered to the stage and to each other: they are both linked and opposed, and the elastic bands are a literal and figurative connection that questions family ties.
The performance also celebrates and critiques masculinity: its presence, presentation, and representation. This timely examination of black maleness asks: What is it about the black male body that we fear?“
II. Pre-Production: The exploration of #PUNK
Clearly, I wasn’t the only one impressed by the performance, because a year later, nora was invited back—this time to the University of Richmond—for a short three-day residency. While portrait of my father was still touring, but nora was hard at work on a new triptych, the first part of which was #PUNK. The company locked themselves inside the Cousins Studio Theatre, a 100 seats black box in the Department of Theater and Dance. They improvised, they played, they had meals together, and by the end of the third day, they emerged with what would be the first draft of #PUNK.
When Nora first told us about the project, we learned she had already conceived it as a triptych and that #PUNK was to be the first part. At the begging of the process, since I was the scenic design faculty at UR at the time, I offered to help. Partly because it was part of my duties but mostly because I was so impressed by what I had seen the year before—I really wanted to be part of the project. And while the team accepted my help sourcing a few elements like cardboard boxes and chalk, they weren’t ready to bring me into the process in a traditional scenic designer role. I was initially discouraged, but by the end of the residency I understood why. The process was messy, largely improvisational and intuitive. It felt almost desacralizing.
A few moving boxes and some chalk transformed into something unexpected. The team began assembling, cutting holes in the boxes, hiding speakers, and tucking in lights. They hung CDs from fishing line strings in front of the lights to create a disorienting, disco ball effect. They started drawing on the architecture with chalk, without aiming for n overarching image. They had their own shorthand, and a deep trust in each other that didn’t require much instruction. They simply attacked the material directly. I comletely understood that reviewing sketches and sitting in productions meetings -however many- would have stifled the process.
I equated it to sketching a painting, versus hitting a blank canvas with paint and discovering as they went. It was a visceral process. Alive.
III. First Iteration: Constant Discovery
I can’t say that the resulting performance was as powerful as portrait for me, but of course portrait was a finished product that had been touring and had the benefit of a longer development period, so the comparison was unfair. This performance, however, felt deeply communal. It was built with the audience involvement in mind, culminating in a literal dance party where everyone was invited to jump on stage, blurring the lines between audience and performer.
The choreography was again, very physical. The dancers, barely clothed, strapped cardboard boxes to themselves. There was no clear rhyme or reason to the lighting—just effects producing an overstimulating atmosphere. It was clear to me they weren’t expecting to emerge with a polished finished product, but something that felt truthful and honest.
Thehis very seminal iteration of #PUNK felt like meaningful and significant. I understood this was a process they were meaning to going to “solve” in a few weeks. It was a journey that would take iteration after iteration—residency after residency, with a new audience every time, and constant discoveries as the work evolved.
About #PUNK nora herself has said:
#PUNK | hashtag punk
“Punk”, a slang for a worthless person, became the name for a loud, fast moving form of rock music that was popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The punk cultural aesthetic includes a diverse array of ideologies (such as self-reliance, non-commercial art-making, non-complacency, destroying and re-purposing, etc.) expressed through fashion, visual art, dance, cinema and literature. The way the visual installation is recycled and transformed by the performers and audience reflects these ideologies.
In her iconic song, Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger, Patti Smith declares “I haven’t fucked much with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future.” Spurred by this daring proclamation, I declare myself to be an “African nigger” – the sort who fucks with the past, and fucks even harder with the present | future.
Encouraged by the punk rejection of status quo, ethics and ethos, I am seduced by the possibility that there is no future, that the future is in the present. In #PUNK, I stage a raw concert inspired by indie music, americana and my formative years in Zimbabwe in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
IV. Audience Response: Dance Party
After the performance, which featured a DJ and two performers interacting with the audience, the company held a short Q&A. The company was warm, they were funny, but above all, they seemed determined—that word seems to sum up nora’s work best for me. Determined.
Everything about their approach felt purposeful. Nothing was wasted. Every movement, every stare, every scream, every song, every beat, every streak of chalk on a cinderblock wall felt deliberate—not calculated, but intentional. Nothing was done purely for aesthetics or style. Everything was a means to explore the messy, instinctive creative process and to dig around until something that resembled a statement emerged. Not because it wasn’t there from its conception, but because the language that it was meant to translate into was the body.
IV. Corollary: The Irrefutable Body
To translate concept into body is to assert its presence, and to assert its presence one must first go to battle with all the labels that have been imposed (on)to it. I don’t claim to decipher it, but I have witnessed its presence.
I believe the question that makes nora chipaumire’s work so clearly determined-irrefutable, was best expressed in her 2014 TED Talk at CalArts:
“I am happy to be here to talk about the body and its physical presence which is clearly an undeniable fact, and the power of this presence also irrefutable.But the Black body, its physical presence is undeniable; its power however, refutable.
The African Black body, its physical presence, is incomprehensible, and its power, terribly disruptive. The African Black female body, its relationship with the rest of the world has led me to so many absurdities, so many conundrums, so many contradictions.
My Black African female body has been historically on a collision course with power, with masculinity, with whiteness, at times, validating these presences, but often refuting them.
My body therefore, my Black African female body, is a gloriously terrible fact, a weapon, a laboratory, an experiment, a theory, a cultural and global imperative, and always potentially disruptive.”
About the Artist
Nora Chipaumire
She/Her
Choreographer, Director & Performer
“nora chipaumire was born in 1965 in what was then known as Umtali , Rhodesia ( Mutare | Zimbabwe ) . She is a product of colonial education for black native Africans – known as group B schooling . She has pursued other studies at the university of Zimbabwe ( law ) and mills college , Oakland | CA. ( dance ) . As African knowledge acquisition does not come with baccalaureates it is impossible to quantify what the African body holds . chipaumire acknowledges these knowledges in addition to the western forms branded into her since 1965.”
source: companychipaumire.com/biography
Collaborators
- Coreographer – nora chipaumire
- Performer – Shamar Watt
- Performer – David Gagliardi
- Performer – Austin Williamson