Norah Chipaumire– She has the Right to Pursue Her Dreams! Lawyer who Turned to Arts to Confront

Norah Chipaumire

 Tapfuma Machakaire  8/12/2022

The scars of a harsh upbringing under an oppressive regime in Rhodesia have moulded a female artist who has risen to become an internationally acclaimed choreographer and performer. In most of her works Norah Chipaumire, a Zimbabwean based in Brooklyn New York in the United States of America, rekindles the hardships faced by the disempowered black majority under colonial rule.

In an interview with France 24 in November 2022 after she performed her just released opera Nehanda: Manifesting Thinking at the Paris Autumn Festival, Chipaumire spoke of her father’s brutality towards his children and her mother. The abuse is brought to light in the performance, Portrait of Myself as my Father.

The exhilarating act premiered in May 2014 at the Harare International Festival of the Arts. Chipaumire with some male characters imitating her estranged father, transforming the stage into a boxing ring and together, they teeter between combat and play, challenging and exploiting stereotypes of black manhood.

She says, “In Portrait of Myself as my Father, I wanted to highlight the stresses that a man like my father and my brothers had to deal with in a vastly shifting social situation. I really wanted to put myself in the shoes of my father and develop sympathy towards the African men because as long as the African man is disempowered, so is the African woman.”

Her explanation was described by France 24 presenter as “personal shockwaves of political events.”

Chipaumire has consistently questioned gender, race and colonial oppression arguing that fundamental freedoms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness should not be limited by race and gender.

Her opera Nehanda Manifesting Thinking has been described as “a performance designed as an immersive, participatory and durational spectacle where participants can collectively perform and investigate the process of law-making and its crucial role in the European colonial project.”

The opera investigates the legend of Nehanda, a powerful spirit which inhabits in women. In the late 19th century, Nehanda’s medium was Charwe Nyakasikana, a heroic revolutionary leader who orchestrated the first uprisings in British-occupied Southern Rhodesia in 1896-97. Together with four comrades, Charwe was captured, and after getting an expedited and unjust trial she was executed. It is said the settlers who executed Charwe ordered her bones and the skull to be sent to the UK.

Chipaumire says when she discovered concert dance, she hoped to use it to manifest the new and experimental ideas and methods in art, music and literature “At the time, I was overwhelmed by the idea and expectation that an African artist should be responsible for the rich and complicated past, the ancient cultures and rituals to be embraced by audiences at home and abroad.”

The energetic   Chipaumire says she has since developed a process and work that embraces and acknowledges that an African body can be simultaneously avant-garde and guardian of ancient. “The intersection of these modes of expressions has helped me create a dynamic and complex physical language. I am currently invested in language-building as it is my belief that the language of the body can influence or create economies and engage civic society.”

Nora Chipaumire was born in 1965 in Umtali now Mutare. She is a product of colonial education for black native Africans known as group B schools. She studied law at the University of Zimbabwe before she went on to study Dance for Film on Location at Mills College in Oakland USA. She has studied dance in Africa, Cuba, Jamaica and the USA and has performed internationally in France, Italy, Japan, Senegal and Zimbabwe, among other places.

In addition to live performance, she has been featured in several dance films and made her debut as film director in 2016 with the short film Afro Promo King Lady.

After receiving her 2016 Grants to Artists award, Chipaumire travelled to Harare, Zimbabwe to work with the Tumbuka Dance Company. She worked with the group on the project nhaka described as a way of thinking, a way of practicing and sharing that can be accessed by all.

Her long-term research project " nhaka, " a technology-based practice and process to her artistic work, instigates and investigates the nature of black bodies and the product of their imaginations.

In October 2009 New York’s online culture magazine Flavorwire spoke to Chipaumire over her collaboration with exiled chimurenga music guru Thomas Mapfumo and his band the Blacks Unlimited. Chipaumire created a stage act that added flavour to the live performance of the band.

“The purpose was to create a new multimedia performance about loss, grief, displacement, trauma and a confrontation with those African brands that we have become complicit in selling, consuming and perpetuating.”

She described Mapfumo as “Zimbabwe’s most significant artist and a childhood hero of mine. I’m a nervous wreck! I have to admit that. I’m frightened shitless to be around The Blacks Unlimited, honestly. I have to meet their power and energy, the expectations I’ve placed on myself and everybody I’ve brought together for this project.”

Chipaumire said she is interested in showing the beauty of the Zimbabwean people and “our love for life. We can’t just focus on death and the dying; we’re a smart, elegant people with a ridiculous sense of humor. We love to dance, laugh, and make beautiful music.” She says she always interacts with family in Zimbabwe. She is worried about the attitude of some Americans towards her continent. “I do think a majority of Americans see Africa as some huge abyss of famine, strange diseases and wars and don’t consider that ordinary lives continue regardless.”

Chipaumire is a three-time New York Dance and Performance Bessie Awardee. These include Urban Bush Women 2007,   her dance-theatre work, Chimurenga 2008 and in 2014 for the revival of her solo Dark Swan. She has a long catalogue of awards. Not much has been documented about her private life and she insists, “We have the right to pursue our dreams.”