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) within this thrumming, resonant work of dance theater. 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.”