nora chipaumire
August 20 – September 3, 2023
Performance Thursday, September 14 – Friday, September 15, 2023
2023-24 Senior Fellow, Fairfield University College of Arts and Sciences
Spring 2021 Recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Three-Month Bubble Residency Grant in Partnership With Fairfield University’s Quick Center for the Arts
I like to think of her as a Michelin-star bedecked chef—when you sit at her table, you just have to trust and surrender: you may never know what she will cook up this time.
—The Brooklyn Rail
Zimbabwe-born nora chipaumire has been challenging and embracing stereotypes of Africa and the Black performing body for more than two decades. Her work fuses the personal and political experience of growing up in Zimbabwe with questioning how status and power are experienced and presented through the body. Her work critiques colonialism and complicated notions of spectatorship and power. The human body for her, and for those born without property, name or class, can be a means of self-invention and self-determination. As a 2023-24 senior fellow, chipaumire will work in residency to present NOT waiting… What if Samuel Beckett had dreamt up two African women in perpetual conversation? nora chipaumire‘s newest project NOT waiting... brings this concept to reality with Senegalese choreographer Germaine Acogny, however, not as a recreation but rather as an original work that focuses on the relationships of women.
Chipaumire previously served as a senior fellow during the creation of her opera, Nehanda.
This program is made possible through the support of Deborah Murtaugh and Louise Levin.