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Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Dance Piece Violent, Moving
By Jennifer Noyer
For the Journal
Choreographer and director Panaibra Gabriel Canda brought the third part of his dance trilogy, “(in)dependence,” to Albuquerque's North 4th Theatre on Friday evening. He and the five dancers traveled from Mozambique to open Global DanceFest's “Journeys AFRICA.”
Titled “Borderlines,” this last part of the trilogy focuses on research related to psychological dependence. Canda explores the psychic territory between individuals in contemporary societies, as each dancer violates the personal spaces around the others to create relationships that are often violent and exploitative, yet yearn for connections.
Ceramic blocks and bricks become burdens, weapons, and finally are steppingstones toward interdependent cooperation. The five characters evolve from rigid, bound movement to a struggling combat to be free and dominant over each other.
Their bodies twist into agonized contortions with sharp changes in direction, connecting in violent attacks. Sonia Mulapha and Domingos Bie reach out and pull at each other's mouths and faces, gesturing with almost spastic energy, as though trying to escape their bodies. Sometimes it seems that the electric wiring of their nervous systems has gone berserk.
These are emotionally or physically damaged people, with one dancer, Amelia Socovinho, speeding across the stage on the stumps of her legs, screaming out her presence to the audience with a repeated exclamation of “Ha!” Maria Tembe and Antonio Bila appear as a mute, unmoving couple at the beginning of the piece, until Tembe drops her burden of bricks and runs in circles, tearing at her clothes. When she stops and grasps Bila in a powerful, suffocating embrace, he repeatedly throws her off, breaking into an agony of scratches and slaps to his body, as though attacked by invisible vermin.
Canda's choreography emerges from the violence of his native Mozambique, torn by a war of independence and a brutal 15-year civil war. Its Human Development Index is one of the lowest on Earth. An estimated one million Mozambicans perished during the civil war, and many mutilations occurred from land mines.
Both Bila and Socovinho have been crippled, but are used in Canda's dance as metaphors to demonstrate the ways humans relate to difference — to the threatening “other.” The silent, almost catatonic Bila becomes a love object for the other four characters, especially Tembe, who obsesses over him like a dark version of the Magdalene. They carry him around, kissing and embracing him in a human feast that descends into biting and cannibalization. Then the group turns on him, lashing out and spitting. He is then draped in white, with a crown of thorns, as he proclaims a pursuit of peace, calling out to Jesus and Allah before moving in painful contortions offstage.
The final section reveals a slow, painful procession across stage as the four characters follow their sacrificed Bila. They step over each other, onto backs, heads, shoulders and breasts, as they move four brick pieces on the floor, drawing their bodies onto them in a collaborative, dependent group action. Music from the Master Chemane S. String Quartet alternates with silence as the group forms tight sculptures along their path.
The audience was stunned and deeply moved by this unique performance. I personally have never seen anything like it, and hope Panaibra Gabriel Canada will come again to the U.S.
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