Nora Chipaumire Makes Darkness Visible
By Lauretta Charlton
About twenty minutes into "Portrait of Myself as My Father," by the Zimbabwean-born, Brooklyn-based choreographer Nora Chipaumire, the Senegalese dancer Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye crouches down on the floor, flicks his tongue wildly, growls, and pounds his chest with his fists. His body is practically naked, and his movements suggest someone who is only beginning to discover the extent of his powers, tentative yet forceful and commanding. Watching him, I thought of European colonists observing native African tribes for the first time, but somehow I found the situation amusing, like Chipaumire was goading us, like she wanted Ndiaye to seem frightening, but only because that response said something more about us than it did about him or her work. Once I hit on that conclusion, the scene became even more entertaining. Or at least I thought so. The older woman sitting a few seats from me got up and left the theatre. This show, with its blinding halogen lights, glitchy music, and circuitous, sometimes incomprehensible narrative, does not want you to be too comfortable.
Questions of race and gender are explored through dance and boxing in "Portrait of Myself as My Father," by the Zimbabwean-born choreographer Nora Chipaumire.PHOTOGRAPH BY JULIETA CERVANTES
In "Portrait," Chipaumire uses the personal to reflect on the profound. The piece is set in a boxing ring, and the story is loosely inspired by Chipaumire's relationship with her estranged father, who abandoned the family when she was five. He died in 1980. "It's family as the ultimate blood sport," she has said. More broadly, "Portrait" is about answering the question of what it means to be a black man. As she asks in the show's playbill, Is he "a victim of history and culture? Could the black male African body be a way to comprehend traditions, colonialism, Christianity, liberation struggles, and the impact of these ideas on the African family?" To find answers, Chipaumire becomes a sort of female Dr. Frankenstein, constructing a universal black man out of spare parts. In round one, she lists the steps one by one as Ndiaye, her vessel, demonstrates her handiwork. She herself is also in the piece, and transposes the results of her investigations of the black male body onto her own, blurring the line between male and female. The process is turbulent and disorienting, yet, in Chipaumire's hands, elegant.
To aid her in this transformation, Chipaumire wears football shoulder pads on her slim torso and often assumes the stance of a warrior, puffing up her chest and flexing her arms like a bodybuilder. Her footwork mimics that of a prizefighter squaring off against his opponent in the ring. She narrates her metamorphosis through a microphone dangling from above, using a deep, menacing voice. In her imagination, the black man is a timeless figure full of contradictions. He must project a sense of wealth when he has no money. He must slow down; he must know how to run. He must know how to live; he must know how to die. He is liberated but never free. Chipaumire and Ndiaye are tethered to each other and to the ceiling by ring ropes, marionettes controlled by an unseen puppet master—bound together and in bondage.
After the explosive opening, the show settles into an absorbing meditation on both the black body as spectacle and how black male identity—weighed down by a need to project strength without being perceived as threatening, violent, or dangerous—is especially performative. In one scene, Ndiaye and the dancer Shamar Watt, who plays a sort of referee, begin to grind furiously against the floor, as if they're having sex with an unknown, unseen, and perhaps unwilling partner. Chipaumire continues her prodding of the subconscious fear of black men and the ways it is suppressed, cleverly turning her eye to the world of entertainment, using sports and music as recurring themes in the show. She emphasizes the pleasure these arenas provide while also critiquing the objectification present in the two venues where black men can most stereotypically be found. One of the more clever moments in the performance is when Watt gets worked into a frenzy and cajoles Chipaumire to make her début as her version of her father, this time a prizefighter named Chocolate Thunder. "You can do it, champion! You can do it, champion! You can do it," Watt says. Chipaumire performs a victory shuffle. Watt encourages the audience to applaud, which it did, affably. But in that applause I heard a grotesque relief at having watched someone twist and writhe and contort his body for others' amusement.
Chipaumire's transformation is ultimately an act of female self-discovery. She calls "Portrait" a "manifesto" centered on the ways in which she carries her father with her both physically and spiritually, without really having known him. (At one point, she literally carries Ndiaye's body on her back.) But "Portrait" is also a manifesto on the power of black womanhood, or, to use Chipaumire's words, the "Kinglady," who embarks on a collision course with power, masculinity, sexuality, and whiteness. Chipaumire takes the notion of minstrelsy and revises it along the lines of both race and gender, creating a newfangled tribal vaudeville show for the digital age. Despite the show's dark, pugilistic energy, what I remember most are the moments of joy. You have the sense that Chipaumire, after guiding you through her dizzying metamorphosis, has a new kind of control over her body, that she can do anything, but you have to be willing to see her first.
Lauretta Charlton is the former assistant news editor of newyorker.com.
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