nora chipaumire

What bridges can be made between Harare, Dakar and Paris? What forms of dialogue and exchange can we imagine between these three cities, their history and present? A proposition made to her by the Festival d’Automne, nora chipaumire’s Carte Blanche —renamed as carte noire—has been drawn up as a form of response to these questions. Formerly based in New York, the  choreographer and dancer has close links with each of these metropoles: in Zimbabwe, the country of her birth and in which she founded nhereraHUB, a place of work and reflection which is open to projects of different kinds; in Senegal, where she spent a long period of time working, notably, with the women of the Toubab Dialaw village; and in Paris where several of her works have been presented, the image of which has given her a love of conversation, in the true sense of the word. 
 

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. 

During her second week in Paris, nora chipaumire invites audiences to a carte noire rendez-vous consisting of an evening of dub. She will be setting up a Zimbabwean shebeen, an unofficial bar tucked away in private homes, a place where people come together in order to invent forms of resistance and insurrection in response to the political powers that be.

Part concert part performance, in which voice, gesture and sound collide, #punk draws upon nora chipaumire’s founding years in Zimbabwe, as a means of embodying, in the present, punk energy and rebellion.

Bringing to a close this Carte Blanche and the 2026 edition, nora chipaumire takes over the Fondation Cartier for Contemporary Art and presents gadzi—a Paris chapter. This final piece of new work is a reflection of the extended length of time necessary for a work not only to be installed within a venue, but also to traverse and reconfigure it.