Dancing Around The Revolution
nora chipaumire’s “#PUNK 100%POP *N!GGA”
By Urvija Banerji
“Every n***** needs a revolution, every revolution needs a n*****.” This is the refrain choreographer nora chipaumire adopts in the second act of her show, “#PUNK 100%POP *N!GGA.” Every ten minutes during the hour-long act, chipaumire stops dancing and returns to this sentence. “No one is coming to save us,” she continues. “New York! If there’s one thing that liberals be afraid of, it’s a revolution.”
She pauses for a moment, and then a visceral disco beat kicks in. “We’re gonna party like it’s 1980!” says chipaumire (who spells her name without initial caps), and she begins to dance again.
These aren’t the only words repeated throughout “#PUNK 100%POP *N!GGA”: all three-and-a-half-hours of the “live performance album,” as chipaumire calls it, are flush with recurrent verses. In the performance, chipaumire uses ciphered spoken word coupled with dance, her primary medium, to critique the experience of being black in America.
To chipaumire, the revolution for racial equality is cyclical and ongoing, and indeed, the word “revolution,” which implies turning, particularly interests her. She directs her audience through cycles of confrontation and catharsis, conjuring discomfort with her often provocative references to systemic racism, and then inviting the audience to dissipate the tense emotions this generates through physical means. chipaumire structures the show in a tripartite cycle, creating immersive, heady landscapes in each of the three acts — “#PUNK,” “100% POP,” and “*N!GGA” — and allows the audience 15-minute breaks between them. She requires spectators to stand for the first two acts, asking them to move freely onstage and engaging them directly, often in an openly hostile manner. Any awkwardness manifested in these confrontations releases in moments when chipaumire invites us to move, jump, and laugh with her.
“#PUNK” begins with a seemingly innocuous welcome. chipaumire and her accompanying dancer, Shamar Watt, introduce the show over ska music (played by a guitarist with a wah-wah pedal) as audience members pile onto the brightly lit stage. “This is an introduction to an introduction,” Watt says, emcee style, “from anywhere, somewhere in Africa.” Though born in Zimbabwe, chipaumire stages, to purposely jarring effect, the stereotype of a homogenous, transcontinental African culture by evoking a variety of diasporic dance and music styles — Jamaican, Ghanaian, African American.
The initially cheery atmosphere further unravels when chipaumire starts telling the audience about a time she was confronted walking down the street in Brooklyn. “Hey, you, black, n****, go back to Africa,” she says, imitating the aggressor. She then shows us her response: “Wanker!” she says, enacting a vigorous masturbating motion. In moments like this, chipaumire does not shy away from putting audience members on the defensive, and her facial expressions slip from friendly smiles to angry grimaces. “Cocksucker, motherfucker, watch me go back to Africa!” After a few Elvis style hip thrusts, she moves across the stage to a corner, while Watt moves to another. To the group that decides to follow her, chipaumire says, “This dance is for the King… Kong.” She drops to the floor, growling, arching her shoulders, and thumping her fists to the ground in a gorilla impression. She maintains furious eye contact with me for its duration. Then she stands and her movements grow airier, until her fists are merely evoking a chest pound, without touching her body; the end result looks startlingly elegant.
Later in the act, chipaumire repeats the “go back to Africa” story, this time setting it in Oakland. “Watch me go back!” she screams, and suddenly the guitarist trades his wah-wah pedal for a gnarly punk sustain. chipaumire and Watt gyrate their hips, thrusting in unison, crumping slowly, and hinting at the gwara gwara and the azonto. Their effortless, loose synchronization pleases the eye, acting as a welcome break from their otherwise disjointed, seemingly erratic movements. Both Watt and chipaumire gyrate their lower backs several times across the three acts; gyration, too, is a kind of revolution.
That ska transitions to punk is no coincidence: chipaumire concerns herself with ideas of revolution as appropriation in the next act, “100%POP.” The same cycle of discomfort and relief persists, but in this act, respite shimmers and pulses with the energy of the decade chipaumire situates us in: the 1980s. The soundscape clashes with Louis Armstrong, Grace Jones, and Gil Scott-Heron facing off against staccato beats and noise. chipaumire urges the audience to take up more of the stage to dance, and invites the dance troupe, It’s Showtime New York, to the center to moonwalk. With chipaumire holding court, they freestyle ostentatiously on the red-lit dancefloor, and their precise, big movements send a joy surging into the surrounding spectators.
But for chipaumire, joy comes hand-in-hand with hard reality, and “100%POP” serves as a direct, effective comparison of two revolutions integral to the fight for racial equality. “We’re gonna party like it’s 1980. How are we gonna free ourselves if we can’t read?” chipaumire says toward the beginning of this second act, echoing Marcus Garvey’s famous words and recalling the fight to desegregate schools during the Civil Rights movement. Later, she says, echoing Eric Garner’s last words as a New York City police officer held him in a fatal chokehold in 2014, “How are we gonna free ourselves if we can’t breathe?”
The idea that revolution is cyclical, for its implication that it does not bring about lasting change, may come across as pessimistic on chipaumire’s part, and perhaps it is. But she presents the dance-floor as a space of relief from ongoing oppression, where racial trauma can give way to the pleasurable physicality of the body. In “*N!GGA,” she complicates this idea, locating the body as a site of pain.
In this act, the audience is seated, and chipaumire, dressed in bedazzled safari gear, stands atop a mountain of crates marked “Louis Vuitton,” “YSL,” and “Hermes.” She shouts incomprehensible orders at a shirtless Watt, who beats his chest, frantically runs across the stage, gyrates, performs shoulder isolations, and does push-ups, glistening with sweat. It’s impossibly hard work. “Knick knack paddy whack give a dog a bone,” chipaumire chants. The children’s rhyme, stripped of its innocent tone in chipaumire’s rendition, becomes a sinister tale about brutal work conditions. A blues song about working in the field plays shortly afterwards. “The Heart of Darkness,” chipaumire yells, alluding to the Joseph Conrad novel, while Watt spins agitatedly.
“*N!GGA is a sonic essay that wants to queer both the pathology of racist capitalism that undergirded the colonial project and transatlantic slave trade,” chipaumire writes in the program notes. “Labor, value and aesthetics — what is to be done about the acknowledgement of black African contribution to the world of ideas.” Without this guideline, it would be difficult to discern meaning in the third act, which freewheels in an unintelligible way distinct from its predecessors. But even placed within chipaumire’s own framework, “*N!GGA” feels like a heavy-handed mishmash of symbols and markers that vaguely point to Africa and slavery with no additional direction. The darkened set mirrors the darkening spiral of the act, and to this extent, chipaumire succeeds in totally disorienting her viewer. Perhaps for this reason, the show’s last 15 minutes are its most relaxing, when we are invited back on stage to dance at our own pace to the breezy sounds of Congelese Rumba musician Franco Luambo; the cycle ends in the slow release of these accrued images of capitalism and slavery from our collective bodies. No part of “#PUNK 100%POP *N!GGA” feels accidental. chipaumire wields her chosen art forms expertly to provoke discomfort as well as dispel it, and the fact that she bothers with any form of relief at all suggests a latent optimism at the show’s core.
In the middle of “100%POP,” chipaumire takes her only solo in the entire show. Her tricky, speedy footwork produces an angry, serious dance, but people whip out their cameras to film her anyway. She ends the solo by gyrating her lower back, and then she walks to the side of the stage, breaking character for the first time to flash a brilliant, toothy grin. In examining the immense release of tension I feel when I see her smile, I begin to question if she broke character at all.
