‘Dances I only heard in the night’

Abstract

Choreographed and performed by Faustin Linyekula of Studios Kabako. Co-presented by the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and the Dance Centre's Global Dance Connections Series at the Scotiabank Dance Centre, Vancouver, Canada, 2015.

Notes

1 Keenly attuned to the ways in which official records can not only fail to accord, but can actually overwrite lived experience, Linyekula tells his post-show audience the story of waking up one morning to learn that his country's name had changed: overnight, at the age of twenty-three, Linyekula experienced the transformation of Zaire into the Democratic Republic of Congo. ‘Sometimes we say that there are at least three lies in the name of our country: Democratic, Republic and Congo’, says Linyekula.

2 As Linyekula has put it: ‘My only true country is my body’ (cited in Osterweis Scott 2010: 27).

3 Linyekula acknowledges that the proscenium stage is in many senses ‘a colonial stage’, and yet he also notes that it has long been a part of the DR Congo's performance tradition: ‘for me, the proscenium theatre was part of Congo's culture when I was born’ (italics in original, Gottschild 2007: n.p.)

4 Linyekula identifies his dance practice as a combination of reworked remnants from the dances of his village and international contemporary dance training, influenced by a popular form of Congolese music and dance, ndombolo. When, during the talkback, I ask him about his relationship to traditional forms of African dance, he responds, ‘We are a combination of stories from our grandmothers and the internet.’

5 Consider Rebecca Schneider's insistence on the ways in which the past continually erupts into the present in Performing Remains (2011).

6 Gottschild also quotes Linyekula on his approach to gravity: ‘I work with choreographic movement, energy, rhythm, the body and its physical presence – the challenge to remain standing, vertical, in spite of a crushing environment’ (2007, n.p.).

7 Other scholars have noticed that Linyekula manages to create a sense of home on stage. Osterweis Scott argues that Linyekula's work ‘re-stages the DRC's troubled urban spaces abroad, in an international context’ (2010: 20), while, like me, Sabine Sörgel describes Linyekula's choreography in terms of ‘counter-memory’ and claims that ‘Linyekula's choreography establishes a sense of communal belonging beyond national confines and thereby creates the possibility for a deterritorialized transnational politics to emerge’ (2011: 90–91).