Dancing Climate Activism in Africa: An interview with Mozambican dancer and choreographer Rosa Mário

abstract

This interview connects South African dance maker Lliane Loots in a conversation with Mozambican choreographer and dancer Rosa Mário. Mário has a history of making dance installation work that challenges the relationship of the female body to the natural world – with a sense of interrogating how dance, the body and the art she makes acts as an intervention toward Climate Justice in Africa. This interview, conducted over a series of email exchanges is an intimate encounter between two Southern African dance makers who care, in equal measure, about intersectional identities around gender and climate justice, and artistic practices for female African dance makers.

keywords:

• dance
• the body
• climate justice
• intersectional identities

Notes

1 For more information on the Kinani Dance Festival go to: http://www.kadmusarts.com/festivals/3002.html (accessed 29 May 2023).

2 I use the phrase “site responsive” rather than site specific because although I write about CONEXAO seen at one specific location/space in 2021, the performance work has travelled to other spaces in Maputo and to other festivals. It is thus not created with only one specific site in mind but created with the potential to engage various urban spaces that co-exist with a garden. While these definitions and distinctions are tricky and complex terrain, I am guided by Serrra’s (1989, p. 34) description of what is meant by site-specific performance work;

Site-specific works deal with the environmental components of given places. The scale, size, and location of site-specific works are determined by the topography of the site, whether it be urban or landscape or architectural enclosure. The works become part of the site and restructure both conceptually and perceptually the organisation of the site.

3 I consciously move to using Rosa’s first name at this point as the introduction moves into a more intimate engagement – via the interview – between Rosa and I. I am no longer speaking about her work as an observer, but begin to engage her more personally as a fellow Southern dance maker.

4 See: interview with Germaine Acogny, ‘Voicing the Imaginative in Africa: three creatives speak’ (Loots, Hutchinson & Mbele 2020), in Agenda, vol. 34, no 3. pp. 126-136.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lliane Loots

LLIANE LOOTS is a South African choreographer. She holds the position of Lecturer in the Drama and Performance Studies Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. As an artist/scholar her recent PhD research is framed within an ethnographic paradigm with a focus on decolonial narrative as methodology. Loots founded FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY as a professional dance company in 2003 when it grew out of a dance training programme that originally began in 1994. As the artistic director for FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY, she has won numerous choreographic awards and commissions and has travelled extensively in Europe, America and within the African continent with her dance work. Email: [email protected]