#PUNK - IanDouglas
nora chipaumire was born in 1965 in what was then called Umtali, in Rhodesia (now Mutare, Zimbabwe), a pure product of colonial education for native Black Africans - known as Group B school. She is invested in acquiring and sharing knowledge outside of defined parameters.
Based in New York, she composes and performs "live art": an art made up of the living and which takes on a living form itself, seeking in the moving body a development of expression that languages seem to limit, and a finer understanding that words cannot make perceptible. She likes to associate aesthetics with politics by evoking, through art, colonial questions, including the history of black bodies. Her latest work is Nehanda, a transdisciplinary river-opera, presented at the FTA in 2023. Before and until the beginning of the global pandemic, chipaumire tours #PUNK 100% POP *NIGGA, a political manifesto and three-part concert. Her other live works include portrait of myself as my father (2016), Rite Riot (2012), and Miriam (2012). She released a radio opera in 2021 and the live album Offcuts in 2023, participated in dance films, and made her directorial debut with the short film Afro Promo #1 King Lady (2016).
Nhaka, her long-term research project, is both a practice and a process for her artistic work, based on technology, where she studies the nature of black bodies and the products of their imagination. The work nhaka bhuku I was published in 2020 with the kind permission of the Matadero publishing house (Spain).
nora chipaumire is currently a Doris Duke fellow, a research resident at the NYU Future Imagination Collaboratory, a Mellon artist in residence at Columbia University, and teaches as a guest professor at Freie Universität Berlin this fall. Her pieces have earned her numerous awards in the United States, including four Bessie awards in New York.
JURY NOTES
nora chipaumire's performances have traveled the world and have been presented, among other places, in France, Italy, Japan, Senegal, and Zimbabwe, her home country. Her regular presence in Montreal has allowed the local audience to follow the development of her career: at Tangente, from 2004 to 2012; at the 27th FIFA, in 2009, with the film nora by David Hinton and Alla Kovgan; and finally, at the FTA 2023, with Nehanda, a work that literally overwhelmed the audience. This "immersive opera" offers a large-scale transdisciplinary, sensory, and political experience whose effects act deeply and over time. This "collective ritual," lasting five hours, is thought-provoking and very generous. Nehanda operates as an experience of love and an act of justice, in an open and de-westernizing form. The jury wishes to salute the singular and rigorous approach of the choreographer, whose each piece explores the major themes of colonial history and resilience.
Mieke Ulfig
