#PUNK 100%POP*N!GGA

Past Dates

Dates Location

Feb 26, 2020

Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal

Feb 20 - Feb 22, 2020

Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany

Feb 14 - Feb 15, 2020

Teatro do Bairro Alto, Lisbon, Portugal

Feb 07, 2020

Punta della Dogana Museum, Venice, Italy

Jan 31 - Feb 02, 2020

Side Step Festival / Zodiak, Helsinki, Finland

Jan 25, 2020

Fari Foni Waati, Bamako, Mali

Oct 24 - Oct 25, 2019

Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, USA

Oct 18 - Oct 19, 2019

Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, MA, USA

Sep 25 - Oct 01, 2019

University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Sep 19, 2019

Circular Festival, Vila do Conde, Portugal

Sep 11 - Sep 12, 2019

La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain

Sep 05 - Sep 06, 2019

Short Theater Festival, Rome, Italy

Aug 30 - Aug 31, 2019

La Bâtie Festival, Geneva, Switzerland

Aug 26 - Aug 27, 2019

Theaterspektakel Festival, Zürich, Switzerland

Aug 21 - Aug 23, 2019

Tanz im August Festival, Berlin, Germany

Aug 01 - Aug 03, 2019

Bates Dance Festival, Lewiston, Lewiston, ME, USA

Jul 16, 2019

Nowy Teatr, Warsaw, Poland

Jul 14, 2019

Laznia Nowa, Kraków, Poland

Jul 08 - Jul 09, 2019

Hiroshima for GREC Festival, Barcelona, Spain

Jul 04 - Jul 05, 2019

ITALICA Festival, Sevilla, Spain

Jun 22 - Jun 23, 2019

Theaterformen Festival, Hannover, Germany

May 31 - Jun 01, 2019

Athens & Epidaurus Festival, Athens, Greece

May 26, 2019

Take Me Somewhere Festival, Glasgow, UK

May 10 - May 12, 2019

Kunstenfestival des Arts, Brussels, Belgium

Apr 28, 2019

Transform Festival, Leeds, UK

Mar 29, 2019

Legs Festival, La Raffinerie-Charleroi Danse, Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Belgium

Feb 20, 2019

Same Same But Different Festival, Vooruit, Gent, BE

Jan 18 - Jan 19, 2019

Les Soli, CDN d’Orléans, Orléans, France

Jan 04 - Jan 12, 2019

Jack, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Nov 02, 2018

Quick Center for the Arts, Fairfield, CT, USA

Oct 11 - Oct 13, 2018

Crossing The Line / The Kitchen, New York, USA

Sep 28 - Sep 29, 2018

Serendipity Leicester, Leicester, UK

Aug 22, 2018

Operaestate Festival / B-Motion, Bassano del Grappa, Italy

Jun 19 - Jun 20, 2018

Camping, Paris, France

Apr 29, 2018

Let's Dance International Frontiers Festival, Leicester, UK

Jan 11 - Jan 13, 2018

American Realness, Abrons Art Center, New York, USA

Sep 14 - Sep 15, 2017

Crossing The Line / FIAF, New York, USA

May 28, 2017

Africa Moment, El Graner, Barcelona, Spain

Feb 18, 2017

Live Arts Festival, Institute for Creative Arts, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

*#PUNK 100% POP N!GGA is a punk-style concert as much as it is a dance show… a ‘live performance album’… Chipaumire comes across as defiantly charismatic—a kind of rock star of dance.

– The New Yorker

 

Fueled by punk, pop, and Congolese rumba… a live performance album, as much concert as dance.

– The Boston Globe

 

The piece directs its audience through cycles of confrontation and catharsis, building immersive, heady landscapes across its three acts.

– Arts Culture Beat

 

A genre-defying work that fuses political urgency with radical aesthetics, insisting on performance as both resistance and expression.

– Skene

 

An experiment in black identity and black world-building that utterly disposes of white supremacy as the de facto perimeter of reality.

– BOMB Magazine

#PUNK 100% POP *N!GGA (verbalized as “hashtag punk, one hundred percent pop, starnigga”) is a three-part live performance album inspired by chipaumire’s formative years in Zimbabwe and the energy and rebellion of punk and 1980s New Wave music. Each part explores one of three sonic ideologies: Punk, Pop, and Congolese Rumba (in that order), which are confronted and celebrated through music artist Patti Smith, Grace Jones, and RitNzele. Each session exists as a complete statement and can be performed separately (like a single song) or together as an epic song cycle (like an album). Together, the trio paints a sonic and visual landscape, engaging voice, gesture and sound clash installation.

#PUNK (verbalised as hashtag punk)“Punk”, a slang for a worthless person, became the name for a loud, fast-moving form of rock music that was popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The punk cultural aesthetic includes a diverse array of ideologies (such as self-reliance, non-commercial art-making,non-complacency, destroying and re-purposing, etc.) expressed through fashion, visual art, dance, cinema and literature. The way the visual installation is recycled and transformed by the performers and audience reflects these ideologies. In her iconic song, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger,” Patti Smith declares “I haven’t fucked much with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future.” Spurred by this daring proclamation, I declare myself to be an “African nigger”-the sort who fucks with the past, and fucks even harder with the present | future. Encouraged by the punk rejection of status quo, ethics and ethos, I am seduced by the possibility that there is no future, that the future is in the present. In#PUNK, I stage a raw concert inspired by indie music, Americana, and my formative years in Zimbabwe in the ‘70s and ‘80s

100% POP (verbalised as one hundred percent pop). Pop can be read as that “art“ of the ordinary, the art most accessible to the people. People – as those ordinary working masses, who don’t necessarily frequent museums, galleries etc. In the work100% POP, I find myself returning to the ways information and knowledge is or was acquired by those of us who grew up in less free times – in times of Drum magazine, african broadcast stations, color bars, poverty, active connections to rural and township lifestyles. Grace Jones is perhaps the first superstar who was black, female and unapologetic about her presence that I️ fell in love with. In 100% POP, Grace Jones‘s renowned“one man show” further instigates the idea of a “cover”. We approach this by soundclashing elements and Grace Jones’, Zimbabwe’s Chimurenga music, dub and noise.

*N!GGA (verbalised as star nigga) Modernity and Contemporaneity is born out of the unlimited and uncredited productivity of the human machine known as “nigga”. Through this session I am proposing a re-evaluation of who is, what is and when is a nigga. *N!GGA is a sonic essay that wants to queer both the pathology of racist capitalism that undergirded the colonial project and transatlantic slavetrade. To engage with this dangerous word and thought is to engage in the powerful aesthetic contributions borne out of the black body. *N!GGA owes its language and grammar to beautiful equations of Congolese rumba music, with icons like Franco and black african imaginaries as well as black african futurity. Labor, value and aesthetics-what is to be done about the acknowledgement of black african contribution to the world of ideas. African pessimism and african optimism are happy partners in this provocative statement. I summon the personage of Rit Nzele, the phenomenal congolese atalaku (one who animates), while rehearsing for the band’s latest release.

 

Premiere Date
October 11-13, 2018

Premiere Venue
Crossing the Line Festival / The Kitchen, NYC

Duration
approximately 3 x 60 minutes

conceived & choreographed by nora chipaumire
Performers: nora chipaumire with Shamar Watt, David Gagliardi or Austin Williamson, Atiyyah Khan, Kris Lee, Antoni Mantorski-Barczuk
Sound Concept | Direction: nora chipaumire
Sound Research | Construction | Assemblage: nora chipaumire
Original Sound Design: Philip White
Touring Sound Engineer: Antoni Mantorski-Barczuk
Technical Direction: Heidi Eckwall
Set Design: Ari Marcopoulos | Kara Walker | Matt Jackson Studio
Text | Script | Light Design | Costume Concept: nora chipaumire
Booking: Thomas O. Kriegsmann, ArKtype (www.ArKtype.org)
Company Management: Leonie Wichmann

 

#PUNK 100%POP *N!GGA was co-produced by The Kitchen, Crossing the Line Festival, and Quick Center for the Arts at Fairfield University. Major support for 100%POP has been provided by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès within the framework of the New Settings Program. Additional support for the trilogy has been provided by the Guggenheim Foundation, NYSCA, Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town, Mid AtlanticArts Foundation, and American Dance Abroad.

#PUNK 100%POP *N!GGA was developed through residencies provided by Lincoln Center Atrium Series, Gibney’s Dance in Process program with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in partnership with JACK, Stephen Petronio Residency Center, Bates Dance Festival, University of Richmond Theater and Dance Department, Operaestate Festival-Bassano del Grappa, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Miami Light Project, and Sarah Lawrence College.