{"id":1029,"date":"2012-09-23T11:04:09","date_gmt":"2012-09-23T15:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=1029"},"modified":"2012-09-23T15:27:12","modified_gmt":"2012-09-23T19:27:12","slug":"out-of-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2012\/09\/out-of-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Out of Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Nora Chipaumire in her Miriam<\/em>. Photo: Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n

In the not-so-distant past, white explorers, colonizers, missionaries, and historians referred to Africa as \u201cthe dark continent\u201d or dramatized it as \u201cdarkest Africa.\u201d\u00a0 They may have been alluding to the skin color of most of its native inhabitants, but certainly to their own inability (and unwillingness) to understand its customs and lore. Over two September weeks, at two different New York theaters, choreographers born in African countries (and all but one still living there) confronted that perceived darkness, especially the part of it that involves powerlessness among women.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s very dark in the new BAM Fisher where Nora Chipaumire\u2019s Miriam<\/em> is about to begin. Still, spectators filing into the four-sided seating may be able to make out a columnar mylar mirror and a ladder; strands of yellow plastic caution tape link them to a piano bench bearing objects, one of which may be a mask or a skull. The single spotlit image is a clear plastic gallon jug filled with water; there\u2019s a hole in it, and liquid drips resonantly into a pan below.<\/p>\n

The luminous jug is more visible than the creator and star of Miriam. <\/em>A leg sticking up out of what appears to be a dark mound covered with small stones is the only sign of Chipaumire. You might first imagine the leg as something amputated from a store-window model, until it re-arranges itself, and the rise and fall of the stones confirms that the choreographer is there. Breathing.<\/p>\n

Then it gets much darker.<\/p>\n

Like other pieces that Chipaumire has choreographed since leaving Urban Bush Women in 2008, Miriam<\/em> speaks about female power, political struggles in her native Zimbabwe, and the spiritual poisons and greed that colonialism spread through Africa. Miriam<\/em>, however <\/em>is more layered in its vision\u2014wilder, messier. The title refers to the great South African singer Miriam Makeba, who spoke out against apartheid; to Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron, whose strength and bravery have long been downplayed; and the Virgin Mary (\u201cMiriam\u201d in Aramaic), who had a notable motherhood visited upon her unasked.<\/p>\n

Someone who hadn\u2019t digested the information that Chipaumire provided about her new work in a program note most probably wouldn\u2019t have guessed her sources. I hadn\u2019t read the note or several published interviews before I saw Miriam<\/em>, and <\/em>the three legendary figures aren\u2019t clearly visible in the work; Chipaumire presents herself\u2014 a woman heroic in scale, fearless, thrilling in intensity\u2014as an embodiment of their power and sense of mission. Makeba\u2014who lived as an exile for most of her life and died in 2008 during a performance after singing her famous song, \u201cPata, Pata\u201d\u2014 was revered as \u201cMama Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Miriam<\/em>, Chipaumire digs into layers of ritual and history, scattering allusions the way she scatters the stones weighing her down. Half-heard words that speak slightingly of African women might have come from the report, \u201cSuppression of Savage Customs,\u201d prepared by the evil Kurtz in Joseph Conrad\u2019s The Heart of Darkness <\/em>(another stated influence on the choreographer).<\/p>\n

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Okwui Okpokwasili as Chipaumire’s companion, overseer, and other self. Photo: Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n

In accord with Chipaumire\u2019s wishes (and perhaps those of her director, Eric Ting), her lighting and set designer, Olivier Clausse, gives her darkness, firelight, and the occasional glare of noonday sun. She is committed to mystery, perhaps in part to acknowledge and counter the colonizers\u2019 view of African women as unknowable\u2014\u201cprimitive,\u201d ignorant, and created to be subjugated. When the house lights go out, we hear her breathing and moaning\u2014then the sound of footsteps. Two tall figures, their shapes complicated by garments and headgear we can\u2019t make out, walk heavily around the perimeter of the performing area, guided by the flashlight one of them carries. Gossipy voices erupt in the score by Cuban composer-pianist Omar Sosa. Suddenly, the flashlight\u2019s beam and a stronger voice emanate from atop the ladder.<\/p>\n

Now comes Chipaumire\u2019s most breathtakingly enigmatic image. She\u2019s writhing and rolling and whimpering, tangled in a large crumpled ball of heavy-duty black plastic. At first, I think there may be two people in it. Quick! How many legs poke out? How many arms? But the long struggle is just Chipaumire giving birth to herself, and when she shrieks, the lights come on bright enough to make the watcher squint. The speaker with the flashlight turns out to be another vibrant performer, Okwui Okpokwasili, and she\u2019s smoking a cigarette, patronizingly tossing some down to the other woman.<\/p>\n

At this point, Okpokwasili is Chipaumire\u2019s oppressor\u2014holding a bullhorn and barking out numbers or words that induce Chipaumire to make moves. These responses differ little from one another, but they cause Okpokwasili to moan in pleasure. Yet she remarks drily, \u201cThis needs work\u201d\u2014 three words that wed a history of exploited labor to the New York rehearsal studio.<\/p>\n

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Nora Chipaumire washing what can’t be washed away? Photo: Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n

The two women are more often warring sisters, alter egos, mirror images. They stomp and kick, yell and squeak in gibberish, shift roles, cross centuries. Everything they do comes into being like fragments of who-can-be-sure-what that are floating by \u2014 leaves on a stream. An object I couldn\u2019t initially identify turns out to be a vessel of water. At one point Chipaumire\u2014heroine and victim, truth seeker\u2014bends over it and washes her face; the already smudged traces of ashy facial adornment don\u2019t completely come off. Does everything contain its opposite? The costumes by Naoko Nagata and accessories by Malika Mihoubi suggest both trash and ruined tribal finery; an object attached to Okpokwasili\u2019s shoulder looks like a battered wing. Sosa (who\u2019s also the second figure trekking through the dark), sound designer Lucas Indelicato, and his assistant, Allen Sanders, create an eerie, similarly disrupted aural landscape, alive with voices and creakings and fragments of piano music and insistent drums.<\/p>\n

The enigmas are fascinating, also maddening. You can\u2019t be sure where Chipaumire is heading or exactly what she\u2019s building in this stew of mingling flavors\u2014half known, half unfamiliar. In the end, she is speaking of the \u201ccrushed strong smell of jasmine\u201d and delivering a last letter to the mother evoked by that scent. \u201cMother, I have become you,\u201d she says. Could the mother be, in part, Africa itself, as well as the dark, half-explored continent of selfhood?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Nadia Beugr\u00e9 from C\u00f4te d’Ivoire in her Quartiers Libres<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n

The four contemporary female choreographers from Africa whose programs opened New York Live Arts\u2019 fall season are not well known here; some are making their first visit. They will, I imagine, be much talked about by the time they finish their six-city U.S. tour of \u201cVoices of Strength: Contemporary Dance and Theater by Women of Africa\u201d (curated and produced by MAPP International Productions and presented in partnership with the Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium). I regret that I was unable to see Program B, which featured works by Maria Helena Pinto and Bouchra Ouizguen.<\/p>\n

Nelisiwe Xaba, Kettly No\u00ebl, and Nadia\u00a0 Beugr\u00e9, the choreographers featured on Progam A, share with Chipaumire the theme of women\u2019s empowerment, specifically that of black women. They are no strangers to revolutions, dictatorships, apartheid, or the misogyny of radical Islam. In their Correspondences<\/em>, Xaba and Kettly No\u00ebl take a satiric, at times humorous approach to African women\u2019s struggles. Beugr\u00e9\u2019s vision is darker, her Quartiers Libres <\/em>an ordeal that induces a visceral response in the audience.<\/p>\n

Another theme shapes Correspondences<\/em>: the artistic relationship that developed between these two choreographers from different countries. Xaba is from South Africa; No\u00ebl was born and raised in Haiti, but has lived and worked in Mali since 1999.\u00a0 A row of clothes bags hanging at the back of the stage provides onstage\u00a0 changes of attire that chart the women\u2019s shifting identities (costumes by Jo\u00ebl Andrianomearisoa) . The music involves sources as disparate as Blossom Dearie and John Cage.<\/p>\n

When Correspondences <\/em>begins, Xaba itemizes the number of mirrors in her domain. Obviously she needs more; she has to check her lipstick in the shiny toes of her high-heels. What with the shoes and the dress, she has a bit of a problem sinking into a split.\u00a0 Kettly enters through the audience with a suitcase\u2014and I mean through<\/em>, not just down the aisles. She takes her time greeting strangers with kisses\u2014oh so sweet, so. . . feminine!\u00a0 Watching her carry on, Xaba\u2019s big eyes get bigger. Who is this person?\u00a0 When Kettly bustles onto the stage, like the uninvited guest who\u2019s ready to do a makeover on your house, startles Xaba with a kiss, and takes a stance, Xaba gets down on the floor and checks her visitor\u2019s underwear.\u00a0 A little encounter in which they bump hips gets fiercer and fiercer; these aren\u2019t just flirty girls teasing each other.<\/p>\n

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Nelisiwe Xaba and Kettly No\u00ebl get down to business in their Correspondences<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n

Yes, they become friends and social-dance together. What they have in common is greater than their differences. They also dance\u2014twisting, turning, falling back\u2014 with their hands around their own throats as if caressing gestures were also strangling them, silencing them. They enact a lesson in cross-cultural adaptations. Kettly, wearing a backpack stuffed with doll babies and standing on a table, figures out meaningful equivalents for the French ballet terms that Xaba calls out. For \u201cpas de chat,\u201d she gets down on her knees and miaows. For \u201cen dehors,\u201d she opens her legs to show her crotch, for \u201cpiqu\u00e9,\u201d she mimes stabbing herself\u2014all the while struggling to understand the words and keep the \u201cchildren\u201d from falling out.<\/p>\n

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Xaba calls out ballet terms. No\u00ebl interprets them in her own way. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n

The two choreographers are good at creating images with double (even triple) meanings. In one of the most compelling vignettes, Kettly opens her suitcase and takes out a rag doll\u2014a very white doll\u2014white skin, limp white dress, fair hair\u2014 about three feet tall. Holding its long, thin arms, Xaba carefully makes its skinny legs walk. It can spin when she grasps it by only one arm or, less kindly, by its hair. The images of a mother teaching a daughter to walk, a strong woman helping a weaker one, and a strong force controlling and punishing a woman\u2019s every move revolve around one another.<\/p>\n

\"Xaba<\/a><\/p>\n

A speech that No\u00ebl delivers after turning her attention again to us begins proudly with \u201cI am a woman\u201d and moves to such topics as the love of money and how those with a lot of it can buy Africa. The text of her speech is projected on a screen at the end, but it seems heavy-handed in relation to everything else that happens. In the end what could be suspended plastic gloves swollen with fluid hang above the women\u2019s heads, the fingers projecting like teats. The performers bite these to drink, to squirt fluid on each other, to smear it on themselves. Water comes out of one glove, I think, a milky substance out of the other. Forget the discarded high heels, the pretty dresses, the women\u2019s differences. They\u2019re being nourished for combat and don\u2019t care how dirty things get.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Enmeshed. Nadia Beugr\u00e9 in her Quartiers Libres<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n

Xaba and No\u00ebl slyly charm us with their mockery and their skill as actor-dancers. Beugr\u00e9, who comes from the C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire, makes no such attempts. Like No\u00ebl, she enters through the audience, bending over a spectator now and then. She\u2019s singing in a language I don\u2019t know, and by the time she reaches the stage, she\u2019s chanting in counterpoint to a medley of recorded voices (Boris Hennion created the live interactive sound).\u00a0 Her title, Quartiers Libres<\/em>, can mean \u201cfree territory,\u201d and Beugr\u00e9 is struggling to claim it. A tall curtain made of strings of crushed and empty plastic water bottles (designed by Laurent Bourgeois) calls to mind the mountains of refuse that people in need pick over. The bottles are beautiful; they gleam in Christopher Kuhl\u2019s lighting. But they are damaged, used up.<\/p>\n

Beugr\u00e9, too, shines in her silver dress. Like Xaba and No\u00ebl, she begins wearing high-heeled shoes. The microphone\u2019s cord, looped several times around her neck, resembles a gray necklace. Sitting on a chair, she opens her legs and shows her black underpants; she lifts the dress to reveal her black bra. She isn\u2019t trying to look beautiful. Off comes the dress; the shoes hang from her bikini like trophies. Her subject is speaking out, taking action. Before undressing, she carries the mic to various spectators and holds it to their faces, although what we hear are grinding and roaring sounds.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Beugr\u00e9, voiceless, fettered by a microphone cord. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n

Having writhed and twisted violently, Beugr\u00e9 is dangerously tangled in the cord when she ventures into the audience for the second time. She bends over certain viewers, looking at them; one woman touches her comfortingly. Then she\u2019s in front of me, bending down to stare into my face. In a voice so quiet it might be rusted, she says, \u201cHelp me\u201d and bows her head. I start to pass the wire loops back over her head very carefully, a handful at a time. When her neck is finally free, she says \u201cMerci\u201d and returns to the stage. I\u2019m shaken for many reasons.<\/p>\n

Objects threaten her, silence her. When she leaps and dives into the bottles, they suddenly seem like prison bars. She holds part of the mic\u2019s cord between her teeth; then jams the mic itself into her mouth and keeps it there for a while. In her most terrifying act, she devours herself into silence by systematically cramming a large black garbage bag into her mouth until only a corner of it is hanging out. She keeps it there for what seems like an unbearably long time.<\/p>\n

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Discarding the empties. Beugr\u00e9 near the end of her Quartiers Libres<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n

By the end of Quartiers Libres,<\/em> she has smashed many bottles by falling on them. And not just those in the hanging structure. She worms her way into a garment made of them; it\u2019s been sitting on the stage all along, resembling a giant tutu. The bottles quiver with her breathing, creak and crackle when she falls on them or wrenches them off one by one and throws them away. Is she free?\u00a0 Temporarily. She bends to bless the stage and walks away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the not-so-distant past, white explorers, colonizers, missionaries, and historians referred to Africa as \u201cthe dark continent\u201d or dramatized it as \u201cdarkest Africa.\u201d\u00a0 They may have been alluding to the skin color of most of its native inhabitants, but certainly to their own inability (and unwillingness) to understand its customs and lore. Over two September […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[416,414,415,177,280],"class_list":{"0":"post-1029","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-dance-from-abroad","8":"tag-kettly-noel","9":"tag-nadia-beugre","10":"tag-nelisiwe-zaba","11":"tag-nora-chipaumire","12":"tag-okwui-okpokwasili","13":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}