Africa Table - Going Beyond Dance, Going Beyond The Sacred: Dance and Resistance in Mozambique
Join the Center for African Studies for our weekly lunchtime lecture series.
Speaker: Aaron Montoya, Lecturer, Program in Writing and Rhetoric, Stanford University
About the Lecture
For my talk, I will present two dance projects that were funded by Information, Education, and Communication (IEC) campaigns about HIV/AIDS in Mozambique. Amatodos (1999) created by the Companhia Nacional de Canto e Dança (CNCD) and Pós-Amatodos (2011) created by members of the CNCD and other contemporary dance groups in Maputo. Amatodos is representative of the predominant narratives about AIDS, which is that AIDS is a form of punishment for subversion of rules. This moral discourse about AIDS has accelerated as a disciplinary regime in 1990s and 2000s. A decade later, Pós-Amatodos presents dancing bodies that rebuff such regulatory power and assert their own claims about spirituality and subjectivity. The dancers enact ecstatic and anguishing experiences of sexuality and gender. The spiritual intensity of Pós-Amatodos is experienced through the dancing bodies that perform energies of rapture and duress.
Audiences understood that they were witnessing scenes of fellow Mozambicans entangled in complicated predicaments where external forces took possession of their lives, their very beings. These were aesthetic scenes that crossed over to religious experiences similar to spirit possession—in some Mozambican languages frequently called mwavi. These mwavi-like aesthetic acts embody the struggle with precarity and state coercion during the neoliberal regime. While desiring love and family, many see themselves as having little agency in their own lives. Instead, the performances display their bodies as conduits for external forces. Many religions in Mozambique include the belief that spirits can take over a body and that through bodily touch and intimacy one can reach out to the other world. Pós-Amatodos re-animates this vision of spirituality as a reprieve from, or even alternative authority to, the modernizing and evangelical projects that advocate agentive self-ownership and control.
About the Speaker
Aaron Montoya is a cultural anthropologist with an emphasis in visual and performance studies, African and African diaspora studies, and Lusophone and Hispanophone worlds. Aaron conducted research in Mozambique from 2009 until 2012 that led to his dissertation Performing Citizens and Subjects: Dance and Resistance in Twenty-First Century Mozambique. His work examines the politics and economics of the cultural performance of dance, placing this expressive form of communication and sociality within the context of historic changes in Mozambique, from the colonial encounter, to the liberation movement and the post-colonial socialist nation, to the neoliberalism of the present. His research was supported by the University of California Eugene Cota Robles, the National Science Foundation, and the Ford Foundation fellowships. From 2010 to 2012, Aaron also produced dance performance and education projects in Mozambique with support from the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United States Embassy in Maputo.