| Nora Chipaumire, Star of New York's Les Ecailles de la Mémiore |
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| Music & Dance - Dance News |
| Friday, 21 November 2008 15:37 |
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She is currently taking part in a dance collaboration in the United States with thirteen other dancers. Roslyn Sulcas of the New York Times, reviews their act and notes that Nora is the unmistakable star of the show... NYTimes- - “Les Ecailles de la Mémoire,” a collaboration between the Brooklyn-based all-female troupe Urban Bush Women and the Senegalese male company Jant-Bi that opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday night, arrives with perfect timing in a country that has just elected an African-American president with a Kenyan father. Urban Bush Women is run by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, who filters African and Caribbean dance traditions through a contemporary vocabulary, exploring both ordinary lives and African-American history. Jant-Bi is directed by Germaine Acogny, an important figure in Europe whose school in Dakar, L’École des Sables, has served as a creative cauldron for a new generation of African and European choreographers. The connections between black Americans and Africa — the very notion of the identity conferred by the term African-American — is the subject of “Les Écailles” (the title is translated as “The Scales of Memory”). It’s an ambitious topic that doesn’t spring fully to theatrical life. The piece appears to be a compelling experience for its 14 dancers, who inhabit the 90-minute performance with unswerving intensity and commitment. But it’s only intermittently compelling to watch, as it moves through a rambling evocation of history and memory, setting images of slavery and oppression alongside joyous group dances that create the apparently obligatory scenes of acceptance and reconciliation. The work opens with a memorable image of the group silhouetted against a pale backdrop, at first moving almost imperceptibly in slow-motion runs. Then the tall, imposing Nora Chipaumire moves forward, speaking in Shona, the principal language of her native Zimbabwe, announcing her name and those of her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. The others begin to speak too, offering their lineages in their own tongues. These statements of identity (not exactly a new idea) tell us what the work will be about: an attempt to understand and accept the past as a way of living fully in the present. But these ideas, passionately verbalized, are vague in choreographic form. To a serviceable guitar and percussive score (by Fabrice Bouillon-LaForest and Fréderic Bobin), the companies at first dance separately: the men in a lightning-quick sequence of leg-blurring runs and quick rolls to the floor; the women moving from low crouches into jumps with limbs outflung. Then Ms. Chipaumire — the undoubted star here — and Babacar Ba appear for a playful duet in silence. The rest of the piece melds the two companies. But there’s little feel of true choreographic collaboration, since they mostly make use of an African dance vocabulary: feet stamping hard, torsos undulating, energy released down to the ground, even in explosive, leg-whirling jumps. This makes for often exciting dance passages, amplified by J. Russell Sandifer’s sensitive lighting. But the theatrical shape and pace of “Les Écailles” is less satisfying. There is never a sense of inevitability or logic about the way one section succeeds another.
“I accept,” the dancers say at the end. But that seems doubtful somehow. “Les Écailles de la Mémoire” will be performed through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene; (718) 636-4100, bam.org |
New York based Zimbabwean dancer and choreographer, Nora Chipaumire, is known for her provocative, political and opinion-challenging dances that put focus upon the struggles of human identity. 
And when the ending arrives, with its re-enaction of the opening and message of acceptance, the piece falls into the stereotyped pattern of many such explorations of black identity.From the Picture Archives
Going Places. Danai Gurira at the Opening Night After Party for the Broadway play August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come And Gone. |
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