Dambudzo, live performance by nora chipaumire, reviewed at Festival d’Automne, Les Chaudronneries, Paris, France, September 12-15, 2024.
Previewing presentations in Europe and the United States, September and October, 2025.
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About an hour into nora chipaumire’s Dambudzo, a musical shift brings several performers to an area in the middle of Les Chaudronneries: they stride into a line and proceed with a quietly jubilant dance. There is a gameful sociality that flutters across the row of performers, as they rhythmically scuff one foot out in front of the other, pouring their weight forward inch by inch, testing how much extension their balance can endure, before withdrawing to more sturdy equilibrium. The dancers eventually drift into a more scattered formation, moving in comfortable unison through a sequence of shuffles forward and back. They sway with an arm raised, then tread buoyantly backward, make a quarter twirl, and repeat the phrase.
This sequence’s gentle synchronicities unfurl to the song “Wafungeyiko” by the 1980’s Zimbabwean band Bhundu Boys. Formed in Harare in 1980, the group was, per music writer Colin Larkin, “a product of Zimbabwe’s late 70s war of liberation,” and their name commemorates “the freedom fighters who fought against the white settlers in rural areas” during that struggle.1 Part of Dambudzo’s complex and fluctuating sonic assemblage, the Bhundu Boys represent one of the performance’s many evocations of resistance, as both a conceptual anchor and a tangible historical genealogy.
As the ensemble continues to groove, one performer slides gradually closer to where some spectators have gathered. Maintaining the easefulness of his dancing, he tests the boundary between spaces for performing and watching, which the itinerant audience has erected by temporarily settling into place. He brushes by a spectator, coming close enough to colliding that this audience member winces. A near miss that seems both casual and calculated, this minor gesture crystalizes a tension that characterizes chipaumire’s piece as a whole. Like other works in the artist’s oeuvre, Dambudzo generates an ambivalent situation for spectatorship. At once inviting and discomfiting, it mobilizes aesthetic encounter to probe the conditions in which relation can emerge and abide, amid ever-present colonial histories.
Dambudzo is a stimulatingly hectic piece—in turns enervating and vivifying. Spectators ambulate freely about the formerly industrial venue, which is divided up by enormous translucent panels. The performers assemble and disperse, moving through a constantly modulating arrangement of scenes and actions: tyroneisaacstuart carries out a solo procession while playing a saxophone that collides with the incessant sound score, SoKo Jena and chipaumire meet for a mirrored choreographic sequence of spiraling arms and hip isolations. The audience encounters an overwhelming abundance of images and sounds, along with proliferating cues for how to navigate the work. Welcome to circulate, gaze, advance to new vantage points, or retreat, spectators are granted remarkable agency to engage the performance’s variety at will. All the while, attention, excitement, and substantial uncertainty must be negotiated.
One component of this large-scale and multi-disciplinary performance installation is a version of a Zimbabwean shabini, what the program notes describe as “an informal bar set up in private homes where citizens gather to evoke the possibilities of resistance and insurrection in the face of political powers.”2 At Les Chaudronneries, the shabini takes the form of a counter offering food and drink before, during, and after most performances, alongside a fridge stocked with free beer to which attendees can help themselves. The sociality of eating and drinking together, and of assembling a community in doing so, subtends Dambudzo’s aesthetic project. The work offers footholds for such conviviality throughout—in moments when ensemble-members dance smilingly through the audience, or near the end, when spectators collect around a scattered constellation of cubes on which performers settle to create deeply enthralling washes of voice, percussion, and mbira.
What unfolds across such scenes, supported through the dramaturgical infrastructure the shabini provides, is an exercise in hospitality. Put another way, Dambudzo experiments with how art can welcome, host, and implicate its viewer. In a recent workshop, philosopher Luce deLire proposed hospitality as a ready-to-hand alternative to the commodity and contract logics that govern so much life today. In the midst of runaway climate catastrophe, insidiously proliferating fascism, and innumerable other disasters, we don’t have time, deLire argues, to concoct brand new social models. Helpfully, the relational porousness of hospitality—not as an industry, but as an interpersonal orientation—is something we already know how to generate. We have familiar ways of opening up a space or a subject to an other, and such practices may furnish the tools we need to meet our moment.3
The format of the shabini appears to exemplify such a social modality. Yet it is not merely this structure’s invitation to enter, eat, and drink that incites dynamic questions about hospitality in chipaumire’s work. Offered on its own, this element of the piece might merely rehearse the interventions, and limitations, characteristic of much of the artistic canon termed relational aesthetics. In an oft-cited 2004 essay, the art historian Claire Bishop critiques works collected under this moniker for their tendency to engage sociality, while leaving the container in which it unfolds—typically in such cases, the art institution—relatively unquestioned.
Rirkrit Tiravanija is one of the best-known representatives of the relational turn, famous for “hybrid installation performances, in which he cooks vegetable curry or pad thai for people attending the museum or gallery where he has been invited to work.”4 Such projects have been lauded for their permissiveness, and for fostering connections among attendees. The hitch, for Bishop, is in the kinds of interactions that germinate here, and among whom. Evoking “the atmosphere of a late-night bar” populated primarily by “art dealers and like-minded art-lovers,” a representative Tiravanija performance is “fundamentally harmonious.”5 By taking as given the common interests of its rarified public, such a work risks reducing “its scope to the pleasures of a private group who identify with one another as gallery-goers.”6
In contrast, the space chipaumire’s work produces is by no means a utopia of shared good feeling; experiences of pleasure or bursts of joy are frequently torqued or abruptly cut off. Those grinning dancers might be taunting the viewers they encounter as much as greeting them. And between songs, as the performers’ startlingly beautiful harmonies fade, a chorus of barks and growls roar in to fill whatever empty sonic space there is. Dambudzo not only interrogates how a performance might host its audience, but also provokes its spectators to reflect on how quick they are to feel hosted, how easily they presume welcome, and why.
The work cajolingly foists abrasiveness and uncertainty on its audience. Amid the swirl of performing and viewing bodies, a football scrimmage breaks out. The lively charm of kicking around a ball snags on the performers’ unbridled expressions of frustration when an audience member fails to return a pass. We are neither coddled nor condemned through participation. Instead, we are met, as one might be at a pick-up game in a park, as players with the real potential to disappoint or rise to the occasion. All throughout these shifting episodes, a driving, multilayered, and sometimes rhythmically clashing soundscape of drumming persists. It is not easy to bear, and a fellow viewer expresses relief when Kwamina Biney, who corrals the soundtrack from behind a tech bench, ushers in something more melodic.
The canine refrain that regularly pierces Dambudzo’s soundscape is intended to evoke a pack of Rhodesian ridgebacks: dogs selectively bred “to hunt and pacify Africans,” the program notes detail, during colonial rule in what is now Zimbabwe.7 A gigantic cardboard cutout suspended from the ceiling also takes the shape of this animal, though in abstracted, outlined form. This obscurity of shape is important. The dog, if more clearly itself, would be too legible, and this is a performance built on instability. Whether one knows the ridgeback’s brutal history or not, swells of insistent growls instill an unmistakable sense of danger each time they suddenly recur.
The fuzziness of this set piece’s shape also compels some speculation among the audience. A fellow spectator saw a horse, perhaps a Trojan one, and this interpretation offers a strangely poignant way to summarize what Dambudzo does. The piece can function as a Trojan horse in two ways. Amid all the absorbing exuberance of dancing, and the soft sociality of song, it nests unavoidable moments of sharp discord, reminders of the historical and ongoing violences to which all our lives are tethered. At the same time, the work reminds us that we might find joy, aesthetic expression, and resistance smuggled into all kinds of inhospitable spaces.
The brilliance of Dambudzo—and it is a work deserving of the word—is that it manages to effect these contradictory operations in earnest. Moments of joy are not a set-up for a gotcha punch-line; the invitation is not a trap. Nor are barbed redirections or calls to account merely decorative. Indeed, it would be nearly impossible to leave this piece feeling only edified and sated, like mere relationality was enough. There is too much visceral unsettling in it for that. The work’s title, after all, means trouble in Shona; and chipaumire’s choreography invites plenty of it. “There are possibilities, choices, alternatives only when one is with others”8 writes Dambudzo Marechera in his experimental 1992 novel The Black Insider. This performance—also his namesake—plays on the full weight of this observation, asking its audience to measure their choices both within the dance, and beyond it.
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Dambudzo is touring Europe and the United States this fall, with performances in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Berlin, and more. Date and venue details are available on nora chipaumire’s website.
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Endnotes
- Colin Larkin, The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (Muze UK, 1997), 514.
- Dambudzo, live performance by nora chipaumire, program notes, Les Chaudronneries, Paris, September 15, 2024.
- Luce deLire, “Digitalized ‘Fascisms’ and The Logic of Capitalism,” workshop, Summer University, Performing Arts Forum, St-Erme-Outre-et-Ramecourt, France, August 26-28, 2024.
- Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (2004): 56, https://doi.org/10.1162/0162287042379810.
- Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 67, 68.
- Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 69.
- Dambudzo, program notes.
- Dambudzo Marechera, The Black Insider (African World Press, 1999), 26.
Fabien Maltais-Bayda