The Decolonial Proscenium: Nora Shumba Chipaumire’s Nehanda and Nhaka Practice

Abstract: Theatre studies as a discipline—and physical theatres operating in the Global North—are increasingly engaged in efforts to address the colonial power dynamics inherent in our field. This essay wrestles with the question: What might decolonial theatre look, sound, and feel like? I examine how the Global South “occupies” the space of empire through Zimbabwean feminist performance artist Nora Shumba Chipaumire’s five-hour-no-intermission opera, Nehanda. I map how Chipaumire advocates for African noise and the politics of sound, how she turns up the volume on the historical silencing of Africans, and works to decolonize the usual Western ecology of theatremaking. Chipaumire engages in a creative practice of nhaka (the chiShona word for inheritance), a choreography of “animist technology, practice and process” celebrating “radical black african presences.” Visually, aurally, and viscerally Nehanda asks: Who gets to hear? Who gets to see? Who understands? With whom does this resonate? Whose (hi)story is this? Whose opera is operating here?