Using dance to tell the story of the struggle in Mozambique

A soft voice entered the dark room, which was lit only by a projection of a globe with the outline of Africa on a screen.

“Who said empires don’t exist anymore,” the voice said, as dancers dressed in European colonial-era robes slowly entered the stage, holding what looked like crosses or swords. They punched the maps of Africa, as if dividing the continent according to their wishes.

Over the next hour, the performance in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, grew into a frenetic dance of stomping and punching, with the movements of warriors in battle set to the rhythm of thundering drums.

“You’re such a liar that even if you lose, you can still win,” declared a man standing quietly at the back of the stage, in what appeared to be a not-so-veiled reference to accusations that Mozambique’s ruling party has in recent years had manipulated local elections.

That man, Panaíbra Gabriel Canda, is perhaps Mozambique’s most prolific and influential contemporary dancer and choreographer. And in many ways, this performance last month, at the same Maputo venue where he launched his first work more than 25 years ago, was the culmination of a career that has charted his country’s complex political and social struggles.

Born the year after Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975, 47-year-old Canda has used his art to sharply criticize his country’s evolution through the struggle for independence, socialism, civil war, democracy and corruption. He has also focused on Western domination and the jaded perception of Africa.

“My work is intrinsically linked to history – the archives of this country, but in dialogue with the world,” Mr Canda said.

Along the way, he founded a company that helped train countless dancers and develop Mozambique’s contemporary dance scene to the point where last month the country hosted “Danse L’Afrique, Danse,” the largest African contemporary dance festival in the world. continent. For the first time.

That’s where Mr. Canda presented his latest production, Applauded liesan ambitious work that presented messages that both questioned the assumptions of African civilization as primitive, and a condemnation of what he saw as a growing discrepancy between the words of political leaders and their actions, especially in his homeland.

Mr. Canda’s career has been marked by a constant reappraisal of what it means to be Mozambican and by “thinking about our global existence,” he said. He has explored the country’s search for an identity and the redefinition of values ​​such as democracy and justice.

“With Mozambican contemporary dance in general, there is a question of understanding,” says Benilde Matsinhe, a journalism lecturer at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, who has covered contemporary dance. “At Panaíbra there is no such doubt. You don’t leave Panaíbra’s performance without understanding what this piece is about.”

Mr. Canda was born in a country that pursued a socialist project and saw the arts as a crucial instrument of indoctrination.

Many independence movements across Africa embraced the Leninist ideology that advocated a workers’ revolution. One way that Mozambique’s liberation movement, Frelimo, sought to spark such a revolution was by promoting a new culture of socialist values, including through the arts.

Dance was used in Frelimo military camps during the war of independence that began in the 1960s, with fighters sharing dances from their communities, says Marílio Wane, an anthropologist at the National Institute for Socio-Cultural Research in Maputo.

“We may be from a different area, but I need to make connections with that person, and dance was a tool for that,” Mr Wane said.

In the first years after independence, former fighters were brought to Maputo to learn dances native to their areas of origin, leading to an inventory of 250 dances throughout Mozambique.

“The purpose was also to comfort those who fought the war by saying: ‘This is the country you fought for, feel better now,’” says Cândida Mata, a former dancer and instructor at the National Dance School in Maputo.

Mr Canda may have been born after the country’s freedom struggle, but he grew up in its legacy.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Canda said he was caught up in the euphoria of an independent Mozambique. He listened to the pleas of the first post-colonial president, Samora Machel, to get children active. He recalled attending events at Heroes’ Square in Maputo, where children sang revolutionary songs and cheered on their president.

Raised by musicians, Mr. Canda loved to dance as a young boy. His father, a locksmith by trade, played guitar in a band, while his mother, a seamstress, was a backing singer. His father’s music, he said, celebrated the liberation struggle and “glorified the movement to fight for the country.”

At the age of 16, Mr. Canda entered a technical school near one of the cultural houses that developed during the socialist era to promote the arts. He studied accounting, but that soon took a back seat due to his frequent visits to the cultural venue Casa Velha, where he took theater classes and joined a theater company. A traditional dance troupe formed in the house, and Mr. Canda said he was ultimately drawn to that art form because he saw dance as a more flexible medium for projecting ideas.

“People expressed themselves freely,” he said. “They jumped, danced, sweated and were not attached to a character or the script in classical theater.”

Casa Velha’s instructors invited former liberation fighters to come and teach traditional dances, introducing various new techniques and traditions from across Mozambique to Mr. Canda.

Early in his career, Mr. Canda focused on traditional cultural dances that Mozambican dancers often practiced during the liberation struggle. But he felt that traditional dance was stifling his creativity.

So he started thinking about his life in Maputo, his current concerns and the burning issues in his country – communism, democracy, freedom of expression.

He has a lot of material to work with these days. Many Mozambicans are increasingly concerned that their government is sliding toward authoritarianism. An extremist uprising in the north of the country has led to some instability.

Mr. Canda’s work expresses his disillusionment with politics, a feeling that Mozambique’s leaders are lying to their voters.

But amid the pressing issues, he has tried to use new aesthetics and rhythms to transform traditional dance. He once mixed xigubo, a traditional Mozambican war dance, with fado, a musical genre from Portugal. It was an experiment, Mr. Canda said, to see what happens when you combine art from a colonial power that imposed its customs on its country with Mozambican tradition.

Through it all, Mr. Canda said, he is trying to understand his times and establish a historical record.

“I wanted to create something inspired by traditional dances, but that reflected my times,” he said. “I hope that future generations can understand our times through my work.”