Powerful Artists in Artist Residency at the Quick

Over the last three months, Fairfield University’s Quick Center for the Arts has served as home for nora chipaumire and her team of collaborators. What does it take to create a home away from home for artists for this long? The University folded the artists into our COVID-safety protocols to ensure a safe bubble for everyone involved, artists left their homes to spend three months away from friends and family to get back to work, visas were secured, flights were booked, we found housing in town to make the artists feel a part of the community, and our patrons kindly donated their bicycles to make transportation a little easier.

A three-month residency in a typical Quick season would seem impossible as our space hosts a variety of events and programs that keep the venue extremely busy, but in this moment of change, we were able to seize the opportunity and continue to serve artists in the creative process as part of our residency program.

As is often the case, anything worth doing often takes a community – people who advocate and believe in the importance of making things happen. We want to thank our patrons and community for supporting the Quick and our mission to create extraordinary arts experiences both for audiences and for the artists themselves. We are incredibly grateful to the many staff and faculty on our campus who helped us as problem-solvers in the most challenging of times. We share our gratitude to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation who understood the needs of artists first and chose to support nora chipaumire and her vision to create NEHANDA, as well as countless other artists who needed the support to get back into the creative space. And of course, we are inspired and moved by the work of nora chipaumire and her corroborators, a more apt term for the musicians, actors, dancers, and technicians that transformed the Kelley Theatre stage to turn the opera, NEHANDA, into a reality. We would like to take this moment to list those artists and collaborators in acknowledgement of their work:

nora chipaumire, artistic director | concept | design | performance
Gwinyai Moyo Rutsito, dramaturgy | shona master
McIntosh SOKO Jerahuni, dancer | mbira | voice
Othnell Mangoma Moyo, drummer | ngoma | mbira | voice | dancer
Fatima Katiji, voice | hosho
Tom Jules Samie, dancer | hosho
Tyrone Isaac-Stuart, dancer
Kei Soares-Cobb, dancer
Peter Van Heerden, actor | voice
Lucia Palmieri, voice
Sylvestre Akakpo Adzaku, stage manager
Gregory Kostroff, sound engineer
Roderick Murray, technical director
Alla Kovgan, filming
Mkrtich Mko Malkhasyan, filming
Leonie Wichmann, company management | production
Tommy Kriegsmann / ArKtype, booking

As the residency comes to an end, we are humbled and honored to have served as home to these gifted artists and we are reminded of how powerful the arts truly are. We cannot wait to share this work with you!

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE