From Mozambique: Masks, Jump Rope and Risqué Moves

New York Times

22-05-2025

In the Mozambican dance Nssope, two people swing a long rope as other dancers take turns skipping it. This looks something like the African American game double Dutch, except that in Nssope there is one rope rather than two and the tempo starts very slow. The speed soon doubles, though, and then it triples. The dancers also have some tricks up their sleeves — like jumping the rope while lying down.
This year, the Song & Dance Company of Mozambique headlines the DanceAfrica festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (May 23-26), and for festival regulars, much of what the company is bringing is likely to resemble that rope jumping: familiar but from a different angle.
'Most of the companies that we've brought in over the years have been from West Africa,' said Abdel Salaam, the festival's artistic director. 'I'm trying to move around a bit, so that audiences here can understand the diversity of the continent.'
Companies from Mozambique — in southeast Africa with a coastline on the Indian Ocean — seldom appear in the United States. Although the Song & Dance Company participated in DanceAfrica Chicago in 2004 and performed in New Jersey in 1998, this is its debut at the Brooklyn festival.
Another reason Salaam chose to highlight Mozambique is that 2025 is the 50th anniversary of the country's independence from Portuguese rule. The Song & Dance Company was formed only a few years after independence, and in 1983 it became an official government-funded institution.
'Our goal is to be the house of Mozambican culture, and its ambassador,' said Lindo Cuna, the company's producer and manager. The troupe gathers dancers from all the country's provinces, he said, and its repertoire includes dances from all its regions.
Maria José Gonçalves, a choreographer and dancer, likened the group to a mirror of Mozambique: 'We tell everyone what is going on in the country or in the world,' said Gonçalves, who has been with the company since 1992.
One example of this kind of civic education came at the end of the civil war (1977 to 1992), when the company toured a work called 'Ode to Peace.'
'Outside of the city, people didn't have television,' Gonçalves said, 'so we explained to them that now we have peace.' Another work helped to educate about the dangers of AIDS.
Over the years, the company has also brought in more contemporary elements. In 2002, it collaborated with the contemporary American troupe Urban Bush Women on 'Shadow's Child,' a dance fable. (At one point in it, a Mozambican girl is mocked by Florida girls for how she jumps rope.) For Gonçalves, who performed as a guest of Urban Bush Women in 'Shadow's Child' at the Lincoln Center Festival that year, the experience was eye-opening. 'Every performance was different,' she said, 'and at first I wondered, 'Why is this changing every day?,' but now I do that, too.'
All the selections on the company's DanceAfrica program, though, are traditional. Salaam said that in the past he tried to invite two guest companies to each festival, one traditional and one contemporary. Mozambique has a contemporary dance scene, led by the choreographer Panaíba Gabriel Canda, but Salaam said he could afford only one company this year. Since Song & Dance is the national troupe, he said, it promised the fewest difficulties with visas, which have grown harder to arrange on the American side. 'Last year, when we brought dancers from Cameroon, we were denied 17 visas,' he said, 'so we wanted to avoid that problem if we could.'
Two dances on the program — Mapiko and the dance of the Nyau — have made it onto the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list compiled by UNESCO. They involve secret societies and initiation rites, trance states and masks intended to frighten.
Some of the initiated Nyau dancers, who taught the company part of the ritual, 'have to sleep in a cemetery for a week to prepare,' Cuna said. 'Some dance on a rope because they cannot touch the floor. But they didn't tell us the whole story because it's a secret.'
What the company performs are theatrical versions of these dances, with replica masks and drums. In a UNESCO video, a villager describes Mapiko as 'what appears when we hit the anthill.' In the company's version, a male dancer, wearing a creepy oversized head, interacts with one female dancer after another — this one getting in his face, that one advancing on him with her backside.
The other dances on the troupe's DanceAfrica program lean even further in the direction of entertainment, as opposed to ritual. In Xigubo, a warrior dance from southern Mozambique, men wield spears and shields. In lines and dueling pairs, they kick and stomp as women ululate on the sidelines and drums boom. 'For most dances, the name of the dance is the name of the drum,' Cuna said. 'And each has an identifying rhythm.'
The jump rope dance comes at the tail end of Tufu, during which the company's women, wearing brightly colored sarongs called capulanas, sing and dance on their knees, tilting and pulsing their shoulders seductively. Cuna pointed out that Tufu bears traces of the Arab traders who preceded the Portuguese and that it was originally performed by men. To Gonçalves, it is about 'showing how beautiful we are.'
Ngalanga, the finale, is what Gonçalves called 'a happy dance.' To the sound of drums and the timbila, a Mozambican xylophone made of wooden keys and calabash resonators, men and women enter from opposite sides, then intersperse. They twist their legs. They flap their arms. They shake it off.
In male-female pairs, they do what you might call the bump, their thrusting pelvises colliding in time with a drum hit. It's a cheeky courtship move similar to the Afro-Brazilian umbigada ('belly bump') and the Afro-Cuban 'vacunao' ('injection'), both of which have origins in the Kongo culture of central Africa. The Mozambican dancers do the move cheerfully, in several positions. As Charmaine Warren, DanceAfrica's producer, playfully put it, 'It gets a little nasty.'