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<\/a>Nora Chipaumire conducts class on the Schaeffer Theatre stage. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n
In fact, Chipaumire\u2019s Bates residency comes just weeks after the premiere, in October at New York City\u2019s Kitchen, of a blockbuster piece<\/a> based on her formative years in Zimbabwe.<\/p>\n And now it\u2019s a Wednesday in November at Lewiston\u2019s Bates College, and Chipaumire is facing 25 or so students in the Plavin Dance Studio. They\u2019ll work till around six o\u2019clock, at which point Chipaumire and a handful of students will segue into a rehearsal for a piece she is setting on the students.<\/p>\n Chipaumire is the fourth and final resident artist this fall to create a piece students will perform in the Marcy Plavin Fall Dance Concert<\/a> (named, like the studio, for the founder of Bates\u2019 dance program).<\/p>\n The goal of having resident guest artists in the dance program is to complement faculty teaching with a variety of perspectives, ideas, and teaching styles. But even amongst that variety, Chipaumire stands apart.<\/p>\n Chipaumire observes dancers during a rehearsal. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n Based in New York City, she started making dances in 1998. Her work is grounded in personal history and the culture of the Shona, Zimbabwe\u2019s majority indigenous people. More generally she explores stereotypes of Africa and the black performing body, art, and aesthetics.<\/p>\n \u201cShe has challenged all of us, students and faculty, to probe Western constructs that affect our experiences of our bodies and motion,\u201d says Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Julie Fox, who has hosted Chipaumire and the other resident artists in the Repertory Styles technique course.<\/p>\n Chipaumire began her yearlong affiliation with the college during last summer\u2019s Bates Dance Festival, where she presented \u201ca portrait of myself as my father<\/span>\u201d \u2014 a piece that uses boxing as a means of exploring family, masculinity, and fatherhood. (Her own father left when she was an infant.)<\/p>\n An intriguing aspect of Chipaumire\u2019s practice is its emphasis on the individual, says a student in the technique course, dance and psychology major Alexandria Onuoha \u201920 of Malden, Mass. Even in ensemble passages, \u201cshe doesn\u2019t want us looking at each other. She wants us to do the journey together, but it\u2019s okay if someone is ahead or is in a different space than the group because you’re an individual at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n Chipaumire consults with Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Julie Fox. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n During one session, an undulation movement was frustrating some students, recalls Shae Gwydir \u201920, a dance major from Port Jefferson, N.Y.<\/p>\n Chipaumire\u2019s guidance typified her approach to her medium. \u201cYou have to be true to yourself and move how you \u2018hear\u2019 your body telling you to move,\u201d says Gwydir, \u201cnot how you believe your body should move based on someone else\u2019s directions and examples.\u201d<\/p>\n The piece Chipaumire has developed with the Bates students is based \u201con a figure called Nehanda, who, you could say, was a Zimbabwean Joan of Arc,\u201d Chipaumire explained earlier in the day. Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana was a 19th-century spirit medium of the Shona people who helped inspire a popular revolt against British colonial occupation.<\/p>\n \u201cNehanda calls into the room questions about legality between settler regimes and native persons, questions about lynching, mob violence. And also other issues such as animistic belief systems in which a spirit returns again and again in different epochs.\u201d<\/p>\n The piece Chipaumire has developed with the Bates students is based \u201con a figure called Nehanda, who, you could say, was a Zimbabwean Joan of Arc.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n She says, \u201cI try to go with the spirit of what is calling me, what is urgent for me, what do I need to understand better personally. And then that leads me into wormholes of research and discovery\u201d \u2014 often involving intense consultation with Shona cultural leaders in Zimbabwe \u2014 \u201cso that\u2019s also what I am bringing to the students.\u201d<\/p>\n Back in the Plavin Studio, Chipaumire is wearing a down vest over a loose, layered black outfit. From the initial warm-ups to high energy across-the-floor work that ends the session, the class has a definite arc, almost a narrative flow.<\/p>\n After the warmup, she and research assistant Shamar Watt lead the students through a series of moves that are cumulative in both complexity and intensity. Chipaumire watches the class closely as she leads, and issues guidance that\u2019s sometimes sharp but not mean. In fact, her warmth is infectious. \u201cSmiling is a good idea,\u201d she says. \u201cThink of your entire body as a smile.\u201d<\/p>\n She always seems to be enjoying a secret joke. Sometimes she shares it. Describing a quality of corporeal suppleness and resilience, a tongue-in-cheek Chipaumire looks to the Star Trek<\/em> and Star Wars<\/em> glossaries. \u201cA reed knows resistance is futile,\u201d she says. \u201cIt is better to bend with the Force.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>