#1: A Journey Home Through Dance, Ritual, and Connection

There’s a moment, as an artist in the diaspora, when you realize your career—no matter how impactful, or how recognized—has not yet touched home. For me, that moment came during a visit to Zimbabwe in December 2021. I was researching cultural arts and sustainable community development when Soukaina M-L Edom, the visionary director of AfriKera Arts Trust (AAT), and I discovered our shared interests, sparking an immediate desire to co-create together. That conversation laid the groundwork for what would become Ndima YaMai, a performance project that encourages: Choreography as ceremony, performance as prayer and collaboration as kinship.

Reclaiming Ritual, Reweaving Memory

In Chivanhu culture, Ndima simply put is a woman’s inheritance—land, legacy, and sacred responsibility. Ndima YaMai production is a ritualized reclamation of that inheritance. Through dance, music, storytelling, and ceremony, we remember what we forgot, we revisit rituals within a contemporary container, and explore the impact of those performances on us and others.  Guided by my years of Pan African dance practices, I continue to find access to the potency of ritual that is etched in my body and imagination. However, they are far  removed from their original contexts. Ndima YaMai became yet another container for my re-learning. To me it represents staged memories embodied through the depiction of Mother Figure played by Rutendo Denise Mutsamwira, expressed through her poetry and translated through dance and music. Various themes relating to Zimbabwean women’s stories, spaces, struggles, and self-recognition showed up and were explored and depicted. Ndima Yamai was more than a production for me, it was a homecoming and a healing. It felt like a beginning. I felt like  a daughter coming home after a long time away.

Collaboration Across Continents

In June 7th 2024, the premiere of Ndima Yamai at Allliance Francais, with support from the U.S. Embassy in Zimbabwe through the Economic Advancement for Creative Industries Fund, and additional funding from the University of Florida College of the Arts launched a collaboration that brought together a vision and the incredible talent of their all-female Essence of Women (EoW) Dance Ensemble and AfriKera appretices. AAT runs Zimbabwe’s only full-time, three-year professional dance training program, offering exceptional low-income artists a path to professional artistry. Their commitment to cultivating Black Zimbabwean women in the arts mirrors my mission—to create space where our stories, bodies, and rituals are seen, and uplifted.

Building Bridges, Making Space

The launch of the Ndima YaMai website marks a new chapter in this journey. It’s a way to give this project a few more legs—to extend its reach, sustain its momentum, and build a network that bridges Zimbabwe and the Diaspora. I want it to continue to fuel my love of  bringing artists together. By eventually bridging my U.S.-based collaborators with those in Zimbabwe, I aim to build a sustainable communal creative ecosystem founded on cultural arts inheritance and exchange. My path to creating new intercultural narratives is  born from my love for collaboration,  discovery, and co-creation across cultures and continents to manifest my vision of art as a bridge, dance as dialogue, ritual as performance.

Why It Matters

Creating opportunities for international collaboration is a rare endeavor. Through virtual exchange, creative collaboration, and in-person residencies, Ndima YaMai is an experiment that explores  methods that plant seeds for lasting relationships and networks to birth new possibilities through cultural arts practices. So please explore the site, the photos and footage,  meet the artists, and share with your people. 

Thank you for visiting Ndima Yamai Production’s website.

Rujeko Dumbutshena