Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja & Tschuku Tschuku

The Namibian performance artist Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja is continuously in the process of finding new forms for «Ondaanisa yo Pomudhime» (The Dance of the Rubber Tree). For this collective listening evening at the Theater Spektakel he transforms the «performative cleansing ritual» into a multi-layered soundscape. Rubber trees, Mushaandja explains, have been used in southern Africa for ritual cleansing in rites of passage and in memorial ceremonies for ancestors. In his audio piece, which creates a poetic connection between past and present, the rubber tree plays an important role.

While researching various archives worldwide, Mushaandja discovered historical sounds, which he has merged in his work and mixed with new interpretations. Ethnographic sound documents from the 50s by Ernest and Ruth Dammann, which he discovered in the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, meet with contemporary recordings of the Namibian ethnomusicologist Minette Mans or with current tracks of his band Tschuku Tschuku, who introduce battle and migration songs from southern Africa into the composition. The result is a multi-layered aural picture of «Africa’s radical power of imagination». At the same time, Mushaandja’s work examines the conservation and extinction of cultures and the underlying balance of power. (rb)

About the Collective Listenings

Collectively listening to the radio on picnic blankets on the Landiwiese is one of the festival’s answers to the pandemic. Performers and musicians from Beirut, Nairobi, Windhoek, New York and Oslo have developed new audio-formats for summer evenings in Zürich. Two things have always characterised the Theater Spektakel: community and international diversity – both of which are presently close to impossible. And so, we have asked these artists to create projects for an audio format from afar. During these «Collective Listenings» you sit on a picnic blanket with a radio. Together with hundreds of other people, you can listen to songs and stories by the US performance artist Laurie Anderson, a moderated concert of the Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila, a soundscape by the Namibian performer Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja or «Calls of the Hummingbird» told by Ogutu Muraya and three storytellers.