"Traditional Future"

How can a tradition evolve towards modernity without obliterating its tracks, without betraying its roots? The atypical and self-taught dancer/choreographer, Fernando Anuang’a is supported and inspired by the Maasai songs, ancestral memory, and vocal rhythmic power as an “essential motor” for his vocabulary. Setting out on an initiatory path with a will to take tradition into the future, he researches a way for the Maasaï dance to live its era fully.  

While tourists have exploited the image of the Maasaï jump tradition, Anuang’a’s practice instead infuses this cultural vertical energy with evolving Maasaï undulation gestures. For his third solo, “Traditional Future”, he stays loyal to the Moran (Maasaï warrior) tradition as a symbolic root, while finding a deeper energy and more liberating form of self-expression to bring the tradition into the future. 
 

• Starting his career in 1990, Fernando Anuang’a is the founder of the renowned Maasai dance company RAREWATTS in Kenya. He has worked with African Heritage companies on many occasions in Kenya and abroad, taking any routes where dance could take him in Africa, Europe and Asia. Often characterised as autodidact and atypical, he was and remains inspired by Maasai traditional dance and music.