Mozambique Troupe Energized by Tradition

Working hard to make friends on its first local visit, the National Song and Dance Company of Mozambique offered a vigorous overview of distinctive African traditions and history in a two-part program at El Camino College on Friday.

Formed in 1979 and professionalized in 1983, the company is smaller and less artful in choreographic expression than the older, better known Les Ballets Africains (from Guinea) and the National Dance Company of Senegal.

Too many pieces by general director David Abilio begin at maximum overdrive and stay there indefinitely, demanding that the 19 dancers remain inexhaustible but going nowhere creatively.

The women excel at combined hip rotations and torso contractions while the men’s vocabulary emphasizes forceful stamping and kicking.

Ensembles frequently sweep on and off stage, but most of the dancing stays in place, full front, with minimal traveling steps or interpersonal contact.

Five musicians provide energetic percussion accompaniments, and though it’s easy to enjoy the rousing, celebratory result, only the costumes by Boaventura Hilario and the interludes of a cappella singing and marimba playing bring needed variety to the evening.

Abilio’s seven-part suite “In Mozambique the Sun Has Risen Up” dates from 1985, the 10th anniversary of the country’s independence. Although it builds to a typically dynamic finale, it never tops its more subdued opening: “Tufu/Nssope,” in which 10 women, wearing gold sarongs with white blouses, execute the sharpest shoulder articulations imaginable, then perform a series of difficult jump-rope solos in a disarming, mock-casual style.

Adding native steps to European parade-ground formations, “N’Ganda” depicts the World War I era, when Mozambique villagers fought with the British against the Germans. And “Semba” adds a naive quasi-narrative garnish to happy group dances.

Abilio also attempts a darker portrait of Afro-Euro relations and a more ambitious use of narrative in the hourlong epic “N’tsay.” This parable of colonialism shows a white-masked figure on stilts corrupting free villagers and initiating an era of misery.

But if the portraits of the women’s slavery and the men’s forced labor are undeniably moving, Abilio fails to make the oppressor seem powerful enough to generate such calamity--and he’s much too easily overthrown by collective action. If only life imitated art.