Over a call between New York and Zimbabwe, ankita sharma interviews genre-defying artist nora chipaumire. Two generations of JACK artists collide as these Bay-Area raised performers, bodies of the “Global South,” talk colonialism, collaboration, confrontation, and more. 

nora chipaumire: So, you have a 510 phone number - are you from the Bay Area? 

ankita sharma: Yeah, Bay Area born.

nc: Oh my god! I’m a hardcore Bay Area, Oakland, Berkeley fanatic. The Bay kind of made me.

as: You went to Mills right? Am I making that up? 

nc:Mills was not my whole Bay Area experience, but yes, I went to Mills college when it was still Mills College, before its collapse. 

as: Mills has changed a lot - how was your time there? 

nc: Mills served as a crash course for me. I had come from law and broadcasting before immersing myself in movement practices, so I had no idea what these Western dance forms were, the politics and industry of it all. I mostly took classes in the Caribbean forms–Cuban, Haitian, Dunham. Those classes let me ask: What is this? Why even do this? I was the only African I knew, and I was in another political and economic mindset than my peers; I was talking about colonialism before it became a trend in the arts world. I felt very alone asking these questions, but I was on a mission – like, if Graham and Humphrey could do this – then I’m going to do this myself. I was convinced I just needed one or two smart minds and a space. 

Luckily, I had access to a studio. That studio is how I survived there. Everybody there said I hogged this little rehearsal studio, and in this studio I was hogging, I got the perspective that “you gotta do this, stay the course, be yourself.” So, I left Zimbabwe as a wannabe filmmaker and law school graduate, and the Bay Area molded me into a performing artist.

as: Did anyone help you through your experience as the only African woman in the program?

nc: Well, the Bay Area as a whole allowed me to be around people who are politically switched on. Amongst others, Laura Elaine Ellis–a dancer and teacher with Dimensions Dance Theater– said to me “you’re not Black, you’re African.” That was revolutionary…like, if I’m not Black, what the fuck am I? She meant I couldn’t latch onto this history of the diasporic transatlantic; that history is not mine. Mine is African. I’m not African-American. 

as: How did that conversation impact how you tell your story? 

nc:Since Elaine said “you’re African,” I’ve consciously asked: what does being “African” mean? Growing up in Africa, no one questions what that is because everyone is African. America gave me a distance that allowed me to see my African self from another perspective, which I relish. 

So, I went into Mills College trying to tell my grandmother’s story, talking about being a child of an African revolution that we actually won. I knew my trajectory was to build a language out of my Black African body, which meant eventually coming back to Zimbabwe, because I can't be inheriting other people’s language. It was just like how do I do it economically? How do I do field research like what Katherine Dunham did in Haiti, or Zora Neale Hurston did in the Caribbean? 

as: So how have you done that? How has your practice grown in Zimbabwe?

nc: I’ve physically embedded myself in what we do at home in Zimbabwe, finding masters of traditional forms. There is a lot at stake for me in understanding my mother tongue – the shona vocabulary – because language reflects the cadence of how the body moves. 

The land is also a life force that drives me. For the past few years, we have had our yard and work space, nhereraHUB. All the people you see in my work, the students I teach, we all practice here outside. This is how I've been going towards being physically embedded, and then intellectually letting the imagination fly.

as: Do you and your company perform in Zimbabwe? 

nc:Not as much as we would like to. I try to be present on the African continent as much as I can. I’m invested in the African continent, Black African artists, and their knowledge production. However, there is almost no infrastructure for creating group pieces, and I am really concerned about the group act. One performer is what it is, two is a conversation, and three is a revolution. 

At the same time, I've been really rethinking what performance is. nhereraHUB performs something in Harare, and on the continent, by being a landing space where we exchange ideas. That is a performance few may witness, but nonetheless, it is a critical one. In that sense, we are performing all the time. When performing, we ask - what is knowledge sharing and production? What is a space where you can think with others or with nature?

as: When you’re bringing people into this carefully cultivated space, how essential is trust? 

nc:It’s beyond trust. It's about love. It’s “is this a human I want to spend the rest of my life with?” As a Black person, who is also an African woman, I’ve spent so many years in performance spaces where I would be the only Black person, feeling like no one has my back. So part of the work has been building a tribe – falling in love with people’s energy and potential. 

We may have moments like “maybe this person isn’t as good as I thought” or whatever, but we have enough love to rebuild relationships. Many of us have known each other for years because of that. And, if somebody needs to bounce, they can do that, but they can always come back home. That’s part of my Black African female philosophy. We may not hit it out of the park, but it’s sincere. There’s no pushing each other down, so only one can escape. 

as: When you are telling Zimbabwean, land-based stories, how much do you translate to people with different lineages in the rehearsal room?

nc: Well, most of the team has been to Zimbabwe. The specificity actually helps us all, rather than making a kind of collage of everybody’s story. And while it may be my story that we tell, the people in the room all have the same ambition towards being free, the same understanding that we are of this soil, and the same desire towards the liberated self in our hearts. The difference is how someone holds the vocabulary. We all speak one language, but we do it with different accents. We start at common ground, and then, when the spirit catches us, we go to ourselves. 

as: What does the actual shared vocabulary look like? 

nc: With Dambudzo, for instance, everyone had to read Dambudzo Marechere and other books related to this subject matter. We also all come from living and breathing this nhaka practice, which is physical research into what it means to be unapologetically Black and African. And then, as my collaborator tyroneisaacstuart says: “even if you can’t, won’t, or don’t understand what you’re reading, the room itself is a book.” Meaning, it is important to read the room. This room with people, colors, and objects also becomes a text. The creation of a space is also a text. The work is being done by all of us in the room. 

as: What role do audiences play in creating that space, especially in an immersive setting? 

nc: I came into the performing arts understanding that humans are intelligent. I never gave up on that. You need to challenge these life forms – whatever composition they are. 

For example, we did portrait of myself as my father in Senegal to a 99% Senegalese audience. The piece is staged in a boxing ring where I’m fighting my father’s shadow, becoming him, carrying him with me. The Senegalese are hearing us cussing out our fathers, and they are cussing back. It was just war. That performance was supposed to be an hour and a half; it lasted for 3 hours. No one in Senegal ever forgot it, and we never forgot that experience. When there are people in the audience that are culturally in it, they don’t need a translation. They speak back to the work. When that happens, we are like glory, hallelujah.

And if that doesn’t happen, if even one person walks away saying “damn, I’m gonna look up what this shit is about,” then we are winning. Anytime we are in a space with others, we are winning. And anytime we can reduce the space between you and I, we have won. 

as: I feel like I see an inquiry into masculinity and power in your art, which critical reviews about your work often state as being “confrontational.” What do you think when people say that? 

nc: I am wrestling with what it means to have power and agency. Western people find the work “confrontational” and “masculine” because the West is so gung-ho about power being only in the male body, without understanding that power is power, in any body and every body. The West thinks freedom is only masculine and softness is only feminine. That is a construction which limits the potential of the human organism. The mountain is strong and soft. I can be a woman and a king. There is nothing contradictory there, ankita. Wait, where is your name from?

as: India.

nc: India – so we should have a lot in common coming from cultures with enormous knowledge about the human – its civilization and its language. Like going back to masculinity – is Shiva male or female? Is that even an appropriate question?

as: Well, on a personal level, I wanted to talk to you because people code how I explore power and agency in my work as aggressive, masculine, and confrontational, and it pisses me off.

nc: I mean, I don’t know what aggression means. I see you as me; I see the other as me; So, if I am aggressing, I’m aggressing ideas forced by coloniality. That’s what I'm purging out of my body and this space. Western history is one of violence and trying to annihilate the other. That’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to create a space where we can be vibrantly, urgently alive. 

The people who call the work confrontational know that they owe something to someone for their position in life, and they are not willing to give their position up. We can’t actually rip away the wealth they’ve stolen, but we can wrestle them in this very safe space of theater and ideas. And, when we bring our full intelligence to these ideas, suddenly it feels confrontational. But, like who gives a fuck? Be confronted, then. Just know who you’re being confronted with is yourself. 

Meanwhile, I have work to do, which is to make belligerently smart work. So if I’m also trying to defend what I’m doing, it’s like c'mon now…but yeah, when people say these things, take it as love. They don’t know what to say because they lack the language, which we must build. 

as: Are there examples of people who’ve given you language to frame your work? 

nc: When I’m in spaces where I have to talk about my work, thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, Denis Ferreira da Silva, Achille Mbembe, and Mahmood Mamdani give me ammunition in English to frame what I’m doing. However, I’m also trying to develop the right language to talk about my work. The African context doesn’t have a history of critiquing contemporary art. Without our own language to think about work, we fall back on Western language, which collapses us into the western canon. But the West did not make me. This is what I wrestle with all the time.

At the same time, I want to make work that my grandmother would understand. She had like one grade of education. Why wouldn’t I want my grandmother to understand what my body is doing? Civilization is making work that is so obtuse that your own people can’t understand you. The West loves that because they think it’s so intellectual and shit, but I’m like, the best philosophers are the simplest. As Gayatri Spivak says: if we are to be read in the Western canon, we must find a way to affirmatively sabotage that shit. We must find a way to be in it, but to refuse it and to make work for our universes. 

as: That feels like a good note to end on…I’d ask you more, but I know you have shit going on.

nc: Yeah I have shit going on, but we can continue sometime. We need friends who we walk, talk, and think with, because it’s a lonely place. There’s intelligent life out there – how do we connect to it? It is critical as a young maker to find thinkers – young, old, and in between – to think with. So good luck to you and let’s talk another time, yeah? One love, anytime.