Artists & Projects Directory
Nora Chipaumire
With MIRIAM, the renowned choreographer and dancer Nora Chipaumire creates her first character-driven work—a deeply personal dance-theater performance that looks closely at the tensions women face between public expectations and private desires; between selflessness and ambition; and between the perfection and sacrifice of the feminine ideal.
The inspiration for MIRIAM springs from the cultural and political milieu of Chipaumire’s southern African girlhood, her self-exile to the U.S., and her self-discovery as an artist. But MIRIAM also reverberates with other literary and legendary influences: the writings of Joseph Conrad and Chenjerai Hove; the life of South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba; and the Christian iconography of Mary.
In performance, the persona embodied by Chipaumire emerges from a pile of rocks onstage to convey—through movement and text—a woman’s struggles with the burden of objectification and the weight of resistance in a world defined largely by men. Her efforts are abetted and haunted by an otherworldly character, both angel and devil, performed by Okwui Okpokwasili. In their interplay, MIRIAM renders in vivid images the intensity of women (like Makeba and Chipaumire, and many others) who fight to create themselves despite the dual legacies of strict cultural traditions and imperialist racial views that define female beauty and power.
MIRIAM is directed by Long Wharf Theater associate artistic director Eric Ting. Acclaimed composer and pianist Omar Sosa is creating a score that exploits the physical space which contains MIRIAM as well as the cultural, artistic and lived experiences of both himself and Chipaumire. Lighting Designer Olivier Clausse is creating an interplay of light and shadow that infers the presence of others, real and imagined, within a suggestive stage environment that calls to mind the site of a crime, a mysterious land, or a sacred place of ritual and retreat.
MIRIAM wil premiere in fall 2012. Presenters of MIRIAM may receive up to 50% fee subsidy through National Dance Project Tour Support.