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Faustin Linyekula: punk-laced music meets poetic/political song

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The stage is set with a drummer and kit on a platform stage right. A man with a base guitar stands nearby. Another, dressed in a sequined devil’s cape complete with hood sits, if not exactly center stage, exactly where he should be. He holds a double-necked electric guitar. Scary. We’re gonna hear some hard [...]

The stage is set with a drummer and kit on a platform stage right. A man with a base guitar stands nearby. Another, dressed in a sequined devil’s cape complete with hood sits, if not exactly center stage, exactly where he should be. He holds a double-necked electric guitar.

Scary. We’re gonna hear some hard core music here folks.

A man at a mic, way downstage left and confronting the audience in a suit seemingly of liquid gold, stands staring. He feels like a challenge, like a serpent about to strike and indeed he does. In spoken-word French and a gravely voice he relates his theme: “We deserve more than vanishing…”

Three dancers enter upstage right in semi darkness. I can see them perfectly, undulating bodies. They seem to be generating movement impetuses from the very ground. They journey across the stage and don enormous coats that look at once like piles of garbage and haute couture. A singer joins the golden man at another mic and we are off. A landscape has been established, set before us through specificity of light and shadow, presence and absence. Sound envelops and around me, in the audience, heads begin to bang.

In Congolese choreographer/director Faustin Linyekula’s more more more… future there is elongated structure, obscure narratives, an obsession with duration, false endings, new beginnings, punk-laced music and an underpinning of poetic/political song and spoken word.

As I took notes in the dark, words beyond describing came to mind:

Excess and basic need
A patchwork
And from the golden mantra man, “We have no longer time”
Out of punk-mosh-pit swirling emerges downstage a solo
Center devil
Do se do
Suspense with duration
Pocket of noise
Decorated
Westernized
Amalgam
Tradition with popularity
Lather
Rebellion
Another collapses
Witness
Eyes closed

Light changes the landscape into sand or tiger hide. A duet is danced, at first from far apart then increasingly closer, then uncomfortably and organically close. Movement now emanates from the pelvis. Feet perpetually step, traveling the duo/unit across downstage and very close to us. This feels more confrontational than the golden man shouting. Their bodies speak more loudly, certainly more primitively.

There are some passages in this work that feel very paired down, like they have been boiled down to essentials: bodies, sounds, geographies. It’s like we’re watching the negative of an image. It feels too like sections of the stage are for specific uses, seldom intersecting purposes, so that when the singers and dancers do change places, the effect is startling, like they’ve gone out of bounds or into the wild. We see them with new eyes, re-contextualized and rematerialized.

There was boredom too, and my feeling was echoed in text. I was startled, guilty, and I began to contemplate the apathy inherent in the duration of a scenario that is neither here nor there and the not knowing of its ever coming to an end.

The usual dramatic arc that normally binds me to a piece was absent here. I was displaced, it was deliberate, and I am less assumptive as a result. This particular drama is in fact never done, never finished or tied up in a bow. These men are living it out, tracing it, even now. Their art is their very lives. They can lead us through a landscape of experience, a safari if you will, but we get to get off the bus.

Hope lies in their carrying on, their bodies speaking truth in the midst of boredom, poverty, disempowerment, disenfranchisement… Blessedly art emerges, in all its patchworked glory.

Dreaming out of Desperation: Q & A with Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula

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This feature was originally published in the September-October issue of Walkermagazine. Faustin Linyekula performs at the Walker with his company, Studios Kabako, and guitarist Flamme Kapaya on September 23rd and 24th, and gives an artist talk on the 22nd. IN THE DECADE SINCE he returned to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from a [...]

Linyekula performing in "more more more ... future"

This feature was originally published in the September-October issue of Walkermagazine. Faustin Linyekula performs at the Walker with his company, Studios Kabako, and guitarist Flamme Kapaya on September 23rd and 24th, and gives an artist talk on the 22nd.

IN THE DECADE SINCE he returned to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from a self-imposed exile, 37-year-old Faustin Linyekula has become internationally renowned for super-fluid choreography and dancing that combines intense physicality with formal innovation. While he remains committed to creating art in his home city of Kisangani, and also teaching and mentoring younger artists, his work has fed Africa’s global reputation as a hotbed of new dance.

In 2007, he and his company, Studios Kabako, performed the audacious, four-hour-plus Festival of Lies as part of an artist residency at the Walker. Now they return with more more more … future, a work about political resistance and harsh economic disparities reflecting the uprisings around the world this year. In June, Linyekula spoke by phone with Philip Bither, McGuire Senior Curator for Performing Arts, about the origins of this work; making art in a country ravaged by civil war and a collapsed economy; and how hope, in and of itself, can be a form of resistance.

Philip Bither
Could you talk about the circumstances a few years ago that led to the creation of more more more … future—its inspiration points in terms of your broader work?

Linyekula
Looking back at my work, I had this feeling that I’d spent so much time trying to tell stories—be it brief stories from the Congolese and the collective history, or from a personal experience. And suddenly the question for me was simply, “Have I really danced?” I thought maybe this is a very romantic idea of dance as some kind of state outside history, outside geography, outside storytelling and into something more sublime. So I just thought, “OK. I’ll invite a musician whom I know to make an art dance for people in the Congo and beyond. One of the major voices in the Congolese Soukous and Ndombolo music scenes. He’ll play and I’ll dance.”

Bither
But it didn’t quite turn out that way?

Faustin Linyekula
Well, I started working with guitarist Flamme Kapaya in March 2008. I started digging into the role that ndombolo music plays in our society. This music is so, so important for us. It is part of the daily life and experience of being in the Congo, really. It’s got incredible energy, but it’s there actually to help us forget about our problems—so it’s art as some kind of escape from reality. I started just questioning myself differently—like, “No, I can’t just play ndombolo, I have to investigate further what it means to us.” I came across a text by Achille Mbembe, the Cameroonian philosopher who lives in South Africa, called Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds. I had never heard anyone talk about the role that music has played throughout the history of the country in that way.

I started also looking into popular forms of music in Western society—mostly the rock scene in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and the punk scene in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The energy I was getting from these types of music was similar to the energy I get from Congolese pop. Wow! The punk scene had this energy and it was a form of rebellion. Why is it that, for us here, this energy is helping us forget? Is it possible to play ndombolo with a punk attitude? And if yes, what kind of slogan can we have? The punk scene had “no future,” but we cannot say “no” to a future whose promise is so far away from us. We need more future—so that’s how the title came about: more more more … future. We have sound, really loud, and we scream into the world how much we need to continue dreaming in the middle of this chaos that’s our heritage from our fathers.

Bither
The lyrics to the songs in the piece are projected in English against a wall—where did that text come from?

Linyekula
Vumi, Antoine Vumilia, is a friend of mine, a poet, who had been in jail for seven years when I talked to him about this piece. I said, “You’re here in jail for political reasons, and you’ve been even sentenced to death. When you hear “more more more … future,” what comes to your mind?” Two weeks later he sent me five texts, five poems, which became the heart of the lyrics for the songs that we were making. So going back to the initial impulse where I just wanted to dance? Again, here I am telling stories.

Bither
It’s interesting that in your work you often seem to be finding the balance between an ecstatic response that the physicality of dance or music can give, and a kind of political rage. How do you navigate those tensions, in this work in particular?

Linyekula
God, I wish I knew. Sometimes you just don’t have a choice. You have to go through this, you have to survive. The only way to survive—even if it’s only to remain capable of standing in front of a mirror and facing your own self—is to just take a stand. Sometimes I don’t even need to make dance about these tensions. They are just there and I have to deal with them.

Bither
So it’s not a conscious thing so much as a feeling that you don’t have the luxury to just make a purely aesthetic artwork that can exist outside your country’s history?

Linyekula
 By making the choice of living in the Congo, developing work with people there—it’s somehow in the back of my mind that it’s possible to change my world, at a very small scale. That is definitely a conscious choice. But I’ll say that my ultimate dream is to simply be a poet. By “poet,” I mean being able to transcend all these contradictions. As a citizen I can afford to choose facts, to choose sides and say, “Okay, I’ll side with this cause.” And yet as a poet—as Walt Whitman put it, “Do I contradict myself? Yes, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.” And so maybe there is tension inside me between this conscious political choice of being in the Congo, and wanting to be a poet in the middle of all that. That’s why I need the company of other artists—if we’re many, there is a chance of achieving some degree of poetry besides the weight of the situation. I always tell the team working with me, I wish I was capable of just making a piece about the beautiful flowers we have also in the Congo; only whenever I think about the flowers, it messes up the image I have of corpses that people were never able to bury, and who in turn fed the flowers.

Bither
The imagining of a different kind of future has a particular power in your work in general, and this piece in particular. Could you talk about that role?

Linyekula
With this piece, the screaming is so hard that it should be possible to dream, or to reinvent ourselves and thus give ourselves a future. Maybe today imagining a future is simply resistance to folly, to desperation, and because you keep some hope and you don’t despair—but you still recognize how difficult the situation is—it opens some possibility. Maybe it’s just giving myself the strength to continue being there. And hoping, because I’m not alone, maybe there’s a possibility of throwing some little virus in the middle of that society. This virus could be called “resistance,” and that’s hope and a possibility of a future, because you only resist when you think there is something to hope for, to look forward to.

Linyekula performing with Flamme Kapaya

Bither
Flamme Kapaya is not well known in the United States yet, so can you talk about his role in this piece, and in the musical life in the Congo?

Linyekula
Between 1997 and 2007, at least every year, you heard Flamme’s guitar in a hit song that made the entire country dance, because ndombolo is primarily a dance and party music. So he can walk on the streets of any city or town, and within 15 minutes you have hundreds of people around him. But when you reach such a status, there is less and less space for you to question what you’re doing. Basically, you give the people what they want and you stay there. It’s comfortable. So he says that he needed to go somewhere else. more more more … future was also for him a way of imagining a way forward.

Bither
Hearing his remarkable facility and his technical virtuosity, while also knowing how his music has lived in a very popular world—in the villages and in the music of ndombolo—there seems to be a parallel with your work. There’s a high-art quality in its experimentation and its form, but it also connects on a popular level. Would you say that’s true?

Linyekula
That’s a central question for me today. How can I talk to my grandmother, to the young kids on the streets of Kinshasa or Kisangani, and at the same time, maintain the same degree of rigor in the work, and integrity? An Egyptian theater director named Hassan El Geretly told me something that I took over as mine: contemporary art, wherever you are, is always a very strange animal, and how can you create a sense of identification with that? It’s very important to me to show a work to these kids on the streets and hope that they would say, “What the hell is that? We don’t understand this, it’s so strange, and yet we recognize it.”

Bither
And your other collaborator on this work, Malian fashion designer Lamine Badian Kouyaté—it seems like Xuly Bët, his Paris-based fashion studio, is very high-end in some ways, but also has a kind of urban, pop, Afro-futuristic quality. How did you come to work with him?

Linyekula
Lamine’s work is trendy … he says it’s “funkin’ fashion.” It’s about reinventing one’s self in the city, and about survival with what you have. But we’ve known each other for some time and have common friends, so it was not so much what I saw in his shops in Paris that made me invite him on the project, but it was how he talked about Africa—about, yes, the future. Inviting him to design original material and to discuss the fruition of this project was possible because I knew how he approached things.

Bither
So, he really was a part of the conversation?

Linyekula
Exactly, oh yes – it was really funk over fashion. He reacted to what I was telling him with his own background, his own ideas about the possibility of the future.

Bither
With more more more … future, when one comes into the theater it’s almost as if things are already in motion and you take the audience through a journey—one that feels like it continues even after the show is over, like it might go on forever. How did you come to create this kind of structure?

Linyekula
I definitely didn’t want a show where people come in, the lights turn down, and then it begins. And then you go home and that’s it. I felt it was very necessary to propose a space where we slowly invite people in—and you need time to open your house to people. It’s like warming up a relationship, really. Once you’ve invited people to come in, it’s compelling—they are going to check you out!

So you have a back-and-forth between the house and the stage, and the to-and-fro of trying to sustain the movement with the audience. But of course, it takes a lot of energy to sustain a relationship. Sometimes, you can forget about yourself. So we’ve built in such a moment where we go back to ourselves. We close the circle. The audience might feel excluded, but we need to reassess where we are before we continue. It’s negotiating a relationship amongst ourselves, because we need to move as a group. Maybe that’s another statement about the future, because you cannot do it alone. We cannot do it alone.

 

This week: don’t miss “African punk rock”

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This Thursday is an especially rich Target Free Thursday Night for Performing Arts, with a free poetic/performative lecture-demonstration at 6:00 pm by Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula and guitarist Flamme Kapaya that precedes their two-night run of more more more…future at the Walker Friday and Saturday. The Artist Talk will be followed by a short Q&A, [...]

photo by Agathe Poupeney

This Thursday is an especially rich Target Free Thursday Night for Performing Arts, with a free poetic/performative lecture-demonstration at 6:00 pm by Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula and guitarist Flamme Kapaya that precedes their two-night run of more more more…future at the Walker Friday and Saturday. The Artist Talk will be followed by a short Q&A, and then I recommend that you head over to the Walker Cinema for a free screening of the Staff Benda Bilili documentary at 7:30. Since Staff Benda Bilili were forced to cancel their entire American tour, including their show planned for the Cedar next week, this film is the closest glimpse of the band the Twin Cities will get for now.

Friday and Saturday, Faustin Linyekula’s evening-length dance & music performance will have its U.S. debut tour opening in the McGuire Theater. The title of the performance, more more more…future, is a positive inversion of punk rock’s slogan of no future (think the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”), and guitar god Flamme Kapaya filters the Congolese music of ndombolo through the sounds of punk rock. The piece is equal parts music and dance, as Flamme Kapaya leads a live band onstage and focus shifts between them and the movers.

In talking about the piece, Mr. Linyekula has referenced Antonio Gramsci’s idea of “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” (head about 2:20 into this video) and more more more…future seems to find idealism and hope in the same places as punk’s anarchy and rage.

The distinctive costumes for the piece were designed by Malian/Parisian-based fashion designer Xuly Bët, whose Funkin’ Fashion Factory atelier has been open in Paris since 1989. Xuly Bët has been named a New York Times Creator of the Year in the past, and has used tags on the outside of his clothing as part of the overall look of his designs (another punk gesture?)

more more more…future promises to be a raucous opening to the Performing Arts season. I would like to say that this is a performance that will appeal to world music-types, dance-lovers, the fashion-curious, people who love guitar music, dancers/choreographers, punk/noise/jazz-heads, the fashion-inspired, people who read the New York Times, people who are interested in communism, other subsets, and the unaffiliated.

Check back on the blogs later this week to read the interview with Faustin Linyekula and Performing Arts Senior Curator Philip Bither.

Performing Arts season fires up with a free preview this Thursday

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Congolese singers on customized motorcycles playing invented instruments. An all-nude examination of feminism and gender. A spoken word/hip-hop artist takes on environmental justice. How do these three performances — all coming up at the Walker — reflect global trends and ideas in new performance? Find out this Thursday night at 7pm as Senior Performing Arts [...]

Congolese singers on customized motorcycles playing invented instruments. An all-nude examination of feminism and gender. A spoken word/hip-hop artist takes on environmental justice. How do these three performances — all coming up at the Walker — reflect global trends and ideas in new performance? Find out this Thursday night at 7pm as Senior Performing Arts curator Philip Bither shares his stories and insights, why he chooses these unique performances from around the world, how they get discovered on his travels, and what makes each of the performances tick — this is your chance to dive in.

As multimedia meets storytelling gathering you will  hear from the artists directly via video, some which they recorded on their laptops – at 3am from Paris! As a kind of primer for contemporary performing arts, it opens a window into the minds of some amazing artists, as well as global trends and diversity of these new performance works.

Stick around after the presentation and join the entire performing arts team – Philip, Julie, Doug, Michèle, and Emily for an onstage toast to a bold new season. Check out the McGuire Theater’s backstage areas, including the green room where artists like to leave their signatures on the wall, and migrate up to the Balcony Bar. We’ll be there available for chatting, question-answering, and sharing behind-the-scenes tales. We can even help you pick which performances you should see, and where you should eat before or after the show. What can we say? We are foodies in addition to loving performance. Come introduce yourself – we’ll be wearing our Walker I.D. lanyards.

I hope you will be able to visit us again this year to enjoy some of the outstanding performance we have lined up for this season!

For the entire calendar of events, click here.

I look forward to seeing you here on September 15!

Read more about the event here >>

A Target Free Thursday night event

Story/Time Open Rehearsal

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70 stories in 70 minutes. Bill T Jones is in town to R & D his latest work, Story/Time. Inspired by John Cage’s performance in the 1950’s of 90 stories in 90 minutes, Bill T is launching from there yet absolutely putting his singular mark on the concept. The stage is dissected, taped into numbered [...]

70 stories in 70 minutes. Bill T Jones is in town to R & D his latest work, Story/Time. Inspired by John Cage’s performance in the 1950’s of 90 stories in 90 minutes, Bill T is launching from there yet absolutely putting his singular mark on the concept.

The stage is dissected, taped into numbered boxes. A table sits on center. This has been a production residency, meaning that the piece benefited from exploring technical aspects like lighting, smoke and an actual stage space. This showing feels like a performance and other than the rehearsal garb, there’s nothing to tell you otherwise.

The performers set in a blackout. Lights up and the dancers are in designated spots, posing like pedestrians yet with extra attitude and state-of-being awareness. Bill T sits at the table and begins to read from a notebook. A clock upstage center tracks the minutes. Green apples are eventually revealed.

The dancers’ slow beginning allows us to concentrate on the stories. Though retired from dancing, Bill T is still a magnet. His voice enters our heads and we learn about episodes of his experience or of those closest to him. He excels at portraying other people, painting their pictures, turning his voice into theirs. He becomes his mother, Arnie Zane, John Cage, a tall white man with a penchant for winking and racially slurring.

Sometime around about minute 15 or 20 the dance becomes denser. Bodies begin to collide in partnering, outlining and implying relationship. At times it’s too layered to absorb it all but that may be the point. During one particularly magical running sequence/accumulation, we watched and heard a sound score only, a welcome relief.

We see these dancers think as they work, probably in part because they just learned this particular order of events this week. But it’s an aspect that I hope remains. They are so busy thinking that they cannot inadvertently slip into overdramatization. We see them think as we hear Bill T recall. It’s a lovely and subtle connecting thread, a through line of sorts.

There are moments of alignment, like when a male duet is executed while we hear about a duet that Bill T and Arnie used to do. And like when a scenario happens involving a couch and missed mortgage payments. The scene is replayed three or four times, traveling through the space and reinacting from the literal to the abstract yet becoming aurally more specific as the dancers’ real names get used. A compelling device, one that lets us in on the process and the game.

Some stories link up or are continued, many minutes later or in back-to-back chunks. Other events stand alone. Silences pepper the action as does stillness (or near to it with that lovely leaning). There is nostalgia, reminiscing and current eventing. There is space for our thoughts to wander, to contemplate our own concept of a minute, the suspense of that and what we could possibly discover if we took the time.

 

 

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

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Next Wednesday at 7 pm, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company will hold a free, open rehearsal for their new Walker-commissioned piece Story/Time, followed by a Q&A with Bill T. Jones and the company. Story/Time is based on John Cage’s performance Indeterminacy, in which John Cage told 90 one-minute, unrelated stories in succession at the [...]

Company Dancer photo by Paul B. Goode

Next Wednesday at 7 pm, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company will hold a free, open rehearsal for their new Walker-commissioned piece Story/Time, followed by a Q&A with Bill T. Jones and the company.

Story/Time is based on John Cage’s performance Indeterminacy, in which John Cage told 90 one-minute, unrelated stories in succession at the same time as pianist David Tudor performed, out of earshot of Cage, selections from Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra and played pre-recorded tape from Cage’s Fontana Mix. The unrelated unison of sound and story illustrated Cage’s philosophy that music is “a purposeless play” which is “an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living.”

The entire John Cage performance exists as a recording you can purchase through Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, or you can listen to excerpts here (and see that the stories do indeed clock-in at roughly one-minute lengths). There is also a website that has transcribed all the 90 stories (plus more from other Cage performances/publications) to be accessed in randomized order.

For Story/Time, the stories are completely new and told by Bill T. Jones himself. The addition of choreography also sets it apart from the Cage/Tudor performance, which included only text and music.

I was able to catch part of a rehearsal today, and the piece—even at this early stage —has an electricity to it.  Cage’s “affirmation of life” shines through, and even better, Bill T. Jones has crafted Cage’s concept into a play less “purposeless.” Don’t miss this chance to see it free Wednesday, followed by the Q&A where you can ask Mr. Jones and his company questions about their creation process, a uniquely intimate opportunity to interact with an artist whose work and success shine so bright.