Seating: General Admission; Standing room. Limited bench seating.
2-6PM: Radio Opera Installation
6PM: Doors, DJ set
7:30-9PM: Performance
9PM-12AM: DJ Dance Party
Radio Opera Installation Only: $10
Dance Party Only: $20
Performance + Dance Party: $40
ALL ACCESS: $50 ($20 savings) – Access to Radio Opera Installation, Performance & Dance Party.
Additional Performances:
Friday, May 17—7:30PM
For 25 years Harlem Stage's signature dance series, E-Moves, has brought together phenomenal artists of color to showcase their movement-based creations. On the occasion of Harlem Stage’s 40th Anniversary, Harlem Stage invites back to the Gatehouse artists who have been critical to the legacy of the institution’s dance programming and who serve as inspiration for the future of dance. These artists include Camille A. Brown, Ronald K. Brown, nora chipaumire, and Bill T. Jones.
Contemporary artist, choreographer, and performer nora chipaumire — a “rock star of dance” (The New Yorker) — has enlivened Harlem Stage with her revolutionary dance performances on numerous occasions. chipaumire returns to E-Moves with the New York premiere of ShebeenDUB, which transforms the historic Harlem Stage Gatehouse into a sonic and visual statement of radical black indictment of Empire. Featuring the monumental afternow sound installation, including the soundshitsystem, designed by Ari Marcopoulos and Kara Walker and constructed by Matt Jackson Studio, the afternoon and evening unfold in three parts.
Part 1: Radio Opera
Audiences are first invited to experience Nehanda, a radio opera by chimpaumire which relays the story of Nehanda, a Shona spirit who inhabits women, and in 1866 caused Charwe Nyakasikana to incite resistance against British colonialists in Central Africa. The opera, developing over four hours and played through the sound installation, delves into the Shona people’s experience of the anti-colonial war in Zimbabwe.
Part 2: Performance
Following the opera, three dancers and Dub DJ perform shebeenDUB within the afternow installation, celebrating dub — a musical style that emerged in the late 60s and early 70s which interrogates empire, its aesthetics, and ideas of human rights.
Part 3: DJ Dance Party
To close the night, audiences are invited to participate in a dance party featuring music by a Dub DJ.
Supported by the Mellon Foundation, Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, and Harkness Foundation for Dance.
This program is also supported, in part, by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Diana King Memorial Fund presented by the Charles and Lucille King Family Foundation.
nora chipaumire
