Dambudzo

In this immersive performance presented at Roulette, “rock star of downtown dance” (Dance Journal) nora chipaumire engulfs audiences in a world of sound, painting, sculpture, and performance for a deeply affecting confrontation of colonial legacies.

Musicians, revolutionaries, tricksters, and sellouts embody the many meanings of the word dambudzo (“trouble” in Shona) in this thrumming, resonant, anti-genre work. Roulette becomes home to a Zimbabwean shabini—an informal bar set up in private residences, where citizens gather to invoke the possibilities of resistance and insurrection. Against a sonic backdrop of barking dogs and whirling Zimbabwean music, visitors explore a radically new spatial realm described by its creator 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.”