FESTIVAL D’AUTOMNE – Les femmes Africaines (sisters, wives, mothers, artists)
Les femmes Africaines (sisters, wives, mothers, artists)— music from women’s hearts and hands
With this musical performance, nora chipaumire revisits and develops, alongside five women belonging to the Lébou community from the village of Toubab Dialaw, in Senegal, the score from her piece NOT waiting…devised in 2023 with the choreographer Germaine Acogny.
The will to honour the work, value, sound and creativity of African women finds its expression in music, via rhythms played out on instruments that are none other than their own bodies and everyday kitchen utensils: plates, spoons, bowls, trays etc. By means of these tools, they pass on—with their hands—a form of mathematical expression, of a codified and re-interpreted kind that is very much their own. In this way, their music becomes a testimony to lives impregnated with a rich Muslim heritage and the know-how and customs of a fishing village which is undergoing deep transformation in the Dakar province, on the Atlantic coast. nora chipaumire maps out a line between Dakar and Harare, underlying the diversity of African thought.