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.

At the 2026 Market for African Performing Arts (MASA) in Abidjan, the air inside the Salle Kodjo Ebouclé usually hums with the kinetic energy of West Africa’s most ambitious ensembles.

But when Mozambican dancer Mai-Júli Machado took the stage for her solo piece, Amelle, the roar of the Palais de la Culture dissolved into a heavy, expectant silence.

Machado began the piece topless—a choice that, in many contemporary African contexts, remains a radical reclamation of the female form from the male gaze.

In Amelle, the skin is not a spectacle; it is a parchment. As she moved, her body became a vessel of memory, tracing the jagged line between girlhood and womanhood.

What makes Amelle a vital contribution to the continental dialogue is its refusal to shout. In a world of loud political manifestos, Machado’s “ritual of transmission” suggests that the most profound resistances occur in the quiet, invisible shifts of the psyche.

Her choreography oscillates between agonizing restraint and explosive release—a physical manifestation of the cultural and social “corsets” that attempt to define African female identity.

For a global audience, Machado’s work serves as a reminder that the African body is not just a site of rhythm or labor, but a living archive.

Every deliberate pause and every urgent expansion against “unseen forces” mirrors the resilience required to navigate traditional expectations while carving out a modern self.

Amelle is more than a dance; it is an intimate testimony to the complexity of becoming in a world that often demands women remain still.

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.