When the curtains rose at the Salle Lougah François in Abidjan’s Palais de la Culture, it wasn’t just the stage lights that commanded attention—it was the weight of a collective breath.

In the dual performance of ZO! Mute, South African choreographic titans Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe and Gregory Maqoma didn’t just stage a dance; they conducted a spiritual excavation.

The evening felt like a masterclass in the economy of energy. Mantsoe’s ZO! channeled the mythic spirit of Queen ZO, a figure of terrifying duality.

Six dancers, cloaked in arresting red, moved through a landscape where street dance collided with ancestral ritual. Here, the body was an instrument of both grace and destruction.

The “physicality” wasn’t merely athletic; it was a rhythmic conversation where body percussion replaced orchestral swells, grounding the performance in the grit of urban life and the sanctity of tradition.

However, the true brilliance emerged in the transition to Maqoma’s Mute. If ZO! was the storm, Mute was the deliberate, ringing silence that follows.

Maqoma challenged the audience to find meaning in absence. By leaning into minimalism, every twitch of a finger or tilt of a head carried the weight of a spoken manifesto.

It raised a poignant question for any modern African audience: in a world filled with the noise of greed and despair, can silence be our most potent form of agency?

As the dancers shifted from chaos to contemplation, ZO! Mute became a metaphor for the continent itself—navigating the fragile line between power and collapse, while stubbornly searching for renewal amidst the decay.

A quiet stage, a single performer, and the slow rhythm of memory were enough to hold an entire audience spellbound during a recent performance at the Palais de la Culture, where Ethiopian dancer Elsa “Zema” Mulder presented her deeply personal contemporary dance work Unravel.

The performance formed part of the Market for African Performing Arts, an international gathering that brings artists, producers, and cultural leaders together to spotlight the continent’s evolving stage productions.

Inside the venue’s Salle Kojo Ebouclé, Mulder delivered a restrained yet emotionally charged piece exploring identity, memory, and the complex realities of international adoption.

Conceived and performed by Mulder, Unravel draws inspiration from the Ethiopian Buna coffee ceremony, a communal ritual that traditionally symbolises hospitality and social connection.

In Mulder’s choreography, the ceremony becomes something more symbolic: a thread connecting past and present, homeland and distance, memory and absence.

From the opening moments, the performance adopts an almost ritualistic pace. Mulder’s movements are slow, precise, and deliberately controlled, inviting the audience into an intimate emotional space rather than overwhelming them with spectacle.

Long pauses and measured gestures suggest both longing and reflection, allowing the themes of displacement and belonging to surface gradually.

The work’s emotional depth is heightened by the original musical score composed by Cheikh Ibrahim Thiam, whose soundscape blends layered textures with sparse, fragile notes. The music shifts between subtle rhythmic patterns and near silence, echoing the performer’s physical journey through fragments of memory and identity.

Together, the choreography and music build a multidimensional narrative that avoids easy explanations. Rather than presenting adoption as a simple story of loss or rescue, Mulder approaches the subject through the body’s memory—how experiences of separation and relocation linger long after childhood.

The performance also resists conventional storytelling. Instead of a clear beginning, middle and end, Unravel unfolds through symbolic gestures and emotional fragments. The dancer’s body becomes the site where absence, history, and identity intersect.

At times, the work’s quiet introspection challenges viewers unfamiliar with the cultural references woven into the performance. Yet the sincerity of Mulder’s delivery keeps the audience engaged, revealing moments of vulnerability that resonate across cultures.

For festivals like the Market for African Performing Arts, works such as Unravel demonstrate the growing global reach of African contemporary dance. Artists across the continent are increasingly using performance to explore themes of migration, heritage and identity—subjects that connect deeply with modern audiences.

By the end of the performance, the stage remains quiet, but the questions linger: What does it mean to belong to a place one barely remembers? And how does identity evolve when memory itself feels incomplete?

Mulder offers no simple answers. Instead, Unravel invites viewers to sit with the tension between loss and reconstruction—an experience that continues long after the final movement fades.

The air inside Lomé’s Maison des Arts et du Social didn’t just vibrate with sound; it hummed with the electricity of a shared nervous system.

As the final notes of Synaptic Resonances faded, the audience remained “glued to their seats,” a rare moment of collective paralysis in an era of digital distraction.

Choreographed by the visionary Tréma Michaël Rakotonjatovo, the performance served as more than a closing act for the Off Biennial 2026—it was a glimpse into a borderless, Pan-African future where the body serves as a living hard drive for ancestral data.

The most arresting image was a solitary dancer, her face obscured by a sculptural mask, moving through a digital rain of Zafimaniry motifs. These geometric patterns, traditionally carved into the wood of Madagascan homes, were projected onto the stage as flickering code.

It was a poignant metaphor for the modern African condition: carrying the rigid weight of heritage while navigating the fluid, often chaotic “architecture of flows” of the 21st century.

As performers Adjaratou Yerima, Kafui Dogbe, Farouze Gneni, and Keziah Bagna merged into a quartet, the stage became a responsive organism. Real-time video mapping tracked their limbs, turning muscle and bone into transmitters of light.

For the Ghanaian spectator, the resonance is clear. Much like our own contemporary artists who are reimagining kente weaving through digital pixels, Rakotonjatovo isn’t interested in a static past. He treats tradition as an “invisible current”—a source of energy that must be channeled into new, improvised forms to stay alive.

By the time the dancers collapsed the boundary between performer and observer, we weren’t just watching a show; we were the synapses, firing in unison.