Horácio Macuacua feels the rhythm of the night

Knocking

Norrdans April 21, 2026

Dieselverkstaden, Nacka

Photo: Lia Jacobi

Härnösand-based ensemble Norrdans, on the road since early March, is touring a one-hour work by Horácio Macuacua. The choreographer — a founding member of Culturarte, the first contemporary ensemble in his native Mozambique — has worked previously with global dance artists Cristina Moura, Wim Vandekeybus, and David Zambrano, among others. He credits the seven artists seen onstage for helping create the premiere, which affirms what appears evident: Knocking is at least partially devised, developed through movement generation, then iteration within a tightly knit group, as opposed to being taught top-down by Macuacua to the dancers.

Knocking fortunately avoids many qualities that compromise other devised works in live performance. When a company extrapolates raw material from first principles, it can lose sight of what’s already been done (and done better already by others). Devisers can also be too proud to shape and edit their material. Yes, Knocking includes a lot of what you might recognize from other improvisatory gestation periods — accumulation, emotional extremity, semilingual vocalization, vaguely sexualized interactions — but Knocking knows the difference between figure and ground and it unfolds in three distinct, clearly sequential chapters. The seven characters have no names but each goes on a unique journey we’re able to follow. Knocking begins in one place and it ends somewhere else.

Those environments are largely defined by the contributions of Hanna Kisch (décor and costumes) and Sascha Görg (lighting, plus a dancer and performance artist himself). Their designs turn the open stage into a kind of space station interior. There are tube lights, luminous panels on wheels, and programmable LEDs on open frames which rise, fall, and rotate, in addition to visible booms and rails and generous helpings of haze. In an interstitial moment, dancers align the wheeled panels to create a long wall of white light, which then crosses the stage and leaves behind it a vivid wash of fuchsia. Later, a few of the dancers trap one of their own between those same panels. Something unseen happens to the person they’ve quarantined within that irradiation chamber. It’s eerie, and just one example of how shifty alliances between the performers seem to be. Knocking includes intense face-offs, manic monologues, plaintive solos, and rhythmic chanting. The behavior in some scenes looks as barbaric and prehistoric as the set does futuristic — an engaging contrast that mirrors our current moment, wherein powerful people unleash powerful technology not to solve problems or advance discoveries, but to widen ancient divides and affirm deeply seated beliefs.

Photo: Lia Jacobi

Knocking’s original score by producer-musician Nandele Maguni — also from Mozambique — fits nicely into this temporal schism. The insistent rhythms and mechanical syncopations are at times nearly visible, in the sense one can almost see the sizes and shapes of tools that rattle against one another and generate such crisp percussion. Maguni’s beats, and this is a compliment, recall the heyday of late ’90s experimentalism from groups on record labels like Nothing and Warp (Autechre and Squarepusher, for example).

Likewise, the dancers move with astonishing speed and precision. Viktoria Andersson and Gorik Bellemans in particular change full-body positions so quickly that the effect is akin to watching stop-motion animation. One petroglyph shape becomes another, almost instantaneously, and then another again. Knocking has the staccato quality of sign language or images in a flip book flashing by. The choreography is fiendishly difficult, yet the Norrdans ensemble is never overwhelmed by its challenges. Kaelin Isserlin and Sierra Kellman create memorable, knowable characters increasingly desperate, perhaps, to jump ship.

It’s hard to say whether the almost total lack of partnering or “doublework” in Knocking is an accident of the process. Only near the end do some of the dancers make and sustain physical contact in pairs, and those brief moments are less dynamic than static. Unison without intimacy can come across as militaristic, perhaps another reason why I imagined these seven bodies marooned together in outer space. They’re a crew or a team, not family or friends.

Kellman carries the final few minutes of the show beautifully. The other six dancers disperse into darkness during her lengthy, lyrical solo, which feels both like an exhalation and her proposal of a more gentle way of being. The poignant fact is that we never see any of her cast mates adopt or cosign her languid state. Maybe she’s the sole survivor. Maybe her openness to rest, to release, is the reason why.

Zachary Whittenburg

Zachary Whittenburg has been a journalist, administrator, photographer, and grantmaker in arts and culture since 2008. A regular contributor to Dance Magazine and former dance editor at Time Out Chicago magazine, he has written for numerous additional publications including Critical Correspondence, Critical Read, Dance International, Flavorwire, Pointe, and Total Theatre UK.