Dambudzo
nora chipaumire
WEST COAST PREMIERE
- Price
- $27*
- Genres
- Art, Dance, Music
- Season
- Fall 2025
- DATE
- SEP 25-27
- TIME
- THU-SAT, 8 PM
- RUNTIME
- Approx. 105 minutes, no intermission
- COUNTRY
- Zimbabwe
- PROGRAM
- Not yet available
* Discounts available for REDCAT members, students & the CalArts faculty and staff
Join the conversation in the REDCAT LOUNGE
About
In a powerful performance incorporating dance, sound, painting, and sculpture, nora chipaumire confronts colonial legacies in a transformed REDCAT theater. Drawing inspiration from the Shona word dambudzo, meaning trouble, as well as the ideas of Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, this new work considers the revolutionary possibilities of performance. REDCAT becomes home to a shabini—an informal bar set up in private residences where citizens gather to debate politics and plan community action. Amidst a soundscape of barking dogs and live music, visitors will be immersed in what the four-time Bessie award winner describes as “a name, a desire, a lament, an inspiration, even a loathing—a poem—that speaks to the 1980s before the fall of communism and the end of apartheid.” Reflecting on the complex struggles of her home country, Zimbabwe, chipaumire’s work expands beyond theater into a lived experience of resistance and ritual. Refusing to be confined by category or discipline, her anti-genre performance is an insurgent act of remembering, disrupting, and dreaming forward.
On September 26, there will be a post-show Q&A with nora chipaumire, moderated by REDCAT Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Performing Arts, Katy Dammers.
Presented in English and Shona.
Please note: Dambudzo contains loud sounds and low lighting.
…a rock star of dance.
—
The New Yorker
Dambudzo is a commission of Wiener Festwochen and Festival d’Automne à Paris, produced by nora chipaumire, and developed in residency with Callie’s Berlin.
Funded by the Visual Arts Project Fund of the Goethe-Institut.
nora chipaumire inc. is supported by the Mellon Foundation.
about the artist
nora chipaumire was born in 1965 in what was then known as Umtali, Rhodesia (now Mutare, Zimbabwe). She is a product of colonial education for black native Africans—known as Group B schooling—and is invested in knowledge acquisition and sharing outside of prescribed parameters. Celebrated for her dynamic performance quality, choreography, and interdisciplinary works, chipaumire was a 2012 Herb Alpert Award recipient in Dance. Her past works have included “NEHANDA,” a large-scale opera, “#PUNK 100% POP *NIGGA,” a three-part live performance album, and “portrait of myself as my father,” “RITE, RIOT,” and “Miriam.” chipaumire has been a Doris Duke Fellow, a Researcher in Residence at the NYU Future Imagination Collaboratory, a Mellon Artist-in-Residence at Columbia University, and a Guest Professor at the Freie Universät Berlin. She is a four-time New York Dance and Performance Award (“Bessie”) winner and a proud recipient of the 2016 Trisha Mckenzie Memorial Award for her impact on the dance community in Zimbabwe. She was also nominated for a NAMA award as an exiled Zimbabwean making an impact on the arts at home and abroad in 2020. She was a Fellow at Quick Center for the Arts at Fairfield University (2020) and an Artist in Residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, LMCC (2019-2021). chipaumire is honored to include the acknowledgements of the arts communities in awards such as a recent three-year structural support from the Mellon Foundation (2022-25), a COVID-19 related “Dance Bubble” grant from The Mellon Foundation (2021), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant (2016), a Doris Duke Artist Award (2015) and a Princeton Hodder Fellowship (2014).
cast & creative team
Concept and Creative Direction: nora chipaumire
Performers: nora chipaumire, Tatenda Chabarwa, Joyce Delores Edwards, tyroneisaacstuart, SoKo Jena, Fatima Katiji, Jonathan Kudakwashe Daniel, Mohamed Y. SHIKA
Music Recordings: Bhundu Boys
Production Assistants: Kwadwo Owusu Ansah, Abigail Hutchinson, Johanna Rau, Catalina Wortmann
Film Production: Mieke Ulfig
Sound Engineers: Vusumuzi Moyo, Kwamina Biney
Technical Director: Heidi Eckwall
Technical Assistant: Soren Kodak
Sound Manager: Kwamina Biney, Vusumuzi Moyo
Set Construction: Irene Pätzug
Management: Amélie Gaulier, Laetitia Tshombe
Distribution: ArKtype / Thomas O. Kriegsmann, Astrid Rostaing
