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SUR LES TRACES DE DINOZORD HOLLAND FESTIVAL SUR LES TRACES DE DINOZORD Faustin Linyekula, Studios Kabako thanks to production partner patron this performance has been made possible by CONTENT Info & context Credits Profile Faustin Linyekula Notes About the artist Friends Holland Festival 2019 Join us Colophon INFO CONTEXT date & time introduction Tue 4 June, 8.30 pm by Kiza Magendane Wed 5 June, 8.30 pm 7.45 pm venue meet the artist Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, with Faustin Linyekula Grote Zaal Wed 5 June, after the performance moderator Kiza Magendane running time 1 hour 25 minutes Landloos no interval Sat 15 June, 5 pm, Frascati 3 language The Welcome Table – Édouard Glissant: French with Dutch and English One World in Relation surtitles Sun 16 June, 11 pm, Het Ketelhuis CREDITS direction Faustin Linyekula with Hlengiwe Lushaba (singer) Jean Kumbonyeki, Yves Mwamba, Faustin Linyekula, Michel Kiyombo (dancers), Papy Maurice Mbwiti, Antoine Vumilia Muhindo (actors) text Richard Kabako, Antoine Vumilia Muhindo music Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Requiem, fragmenten), Charles Lwanga Choir of Kisangani, Joachim Montessuis (Nierica), Arvo Pärt (Pari Intervallo, Redeuntes in mi, Trivium, Annum per Annum), Jimi Hendrix (Voodoo Child) music Arvo Pärt published / licensed by © Universal Edition, Vienna / Albersen Verhuur B.V., The Hague production Studios Kabako, Virginie Dupray coproduction KVS Theater, Brussels with support from DRAC Ile-de-France / French Ministry world premiere 13 December 2012 KVS, Brussels website Studios Kabako PROFILE FAUSTIN LINYEKULA Faustin Linyekula (born in 1974) calls himself a storyteller. That might seem strange for a man billed since the start of the cen- tury mainly as a dancer and choreographer at an impressive list of festivals and venues in cities such as Avignon, Brussels, Johannesburg, Lisbon and New York. Linyekula actually wanted to be a poet, but his youthful ambitions were prematurely cut short when Zaire, Linyekula’s birthplace, catastrophically disintegrated at the end of the previous century. How could anyone think of writing something as ephemeral as poetry when the whole coun- try around him was in ruins? So he started acting and dancing. Why dance and theatre? Lacking a country, only the physical presence of the human body connected him to the people around him, his family and his ancestors. He explained it in the following terms in Ballet-Dance Magazine in 2005: ‘I work with choreo- graphic movement, energy, rhythm, the body and its physical presence - the challenge to remain standing, vertical in spite of a crushing environment. I am showing the individual in a context where there is no space for individuals. My only real country is my body.’ Linyekula captivated the world with his dance performances. Fleeing his country, where Mobutu had closed all universities, he went to Kenya. He worked increasingly in Europe, espe- cially France, returning at the beginning of this century to the Democratic Republic of Congo, as his country is now called. First in Kinshasa, later in Kisangani, he developed his Studios Kabako, an art centre with rehearsal rooms postproduction and recording studios. Linyekula received the Principal Prince Claus Award in 2007. The jury praised him ‘for his innovative activation of culture in the face of conflict, and for his energetic commitment to the development of his community.’ He came to the Holland Festival in 2012 with La création du monde (1923-2012). In 2017 The New York Times wrote: ‘There’s no walking away from Mr. Linyekula ... painful, brutal, livewire intensity.’ Linyekula is one of the Holland Festival’s two associate artists this year. All of Linyekula’s work has its origins in Congo. ‘The story I want to tell can’t be told in exile, because it’s the story of my country.’ This can be seen in Congo (2019), which is being performed at Frascati theatre. In this perfor- mance he tries to engage in a dialogue with his country in three different ways. Based on the French writer Éric Vuillard’s book Congo, Linyekula’s Congo is danced, spoken and sung. In this respect the performance is classic Linyekula; his work is always multidisciplinary because of his many collaborations. For instance, he often uses text, whether spoken or projected, in his dance per- formances. The poet in Linyekula never really passed away. In Sur les traces de Dinozord he mixes music (including Mozarts Requiem), text and dance. The title refers to the name of hiphop dancer Dinozord. The work is a journey through Linyekula’s past, his childhood in Kisangani. He remembers old friends and shifts the ruins of Congo in an attempt to construct a better story of their lives. One of them is his friend Richard Kabako, who died of bubonic plague at the Ugandan border in 1994 and was buried in an unmarked grave. Linyekula sees Kabako’s story as symptomat- ic of his country, where so many people’s hopes of a better future are dashed every day. It is also a story about migration, extending far beyond Congo and still topical. With good reason Linyekula named his art centre after his childhood friend - the storyteller from Kisangani could not tell a more important story. Studios Kabako is essentially a large house. It is not surprising that it only ever produces multidisciplinary performances; nobody is ever alone there. People and artists from the neighbourhood may come and go as they please. A family even lives on the property. There is a space in the garden covered in blue tarpaulin, which functions as a dance floor. Much of the space inside is set up as a recording studio. Music, and particularly the technical side (production and mixing), is another of Linyekula’s passions. He and South African actress and singer Hlengiwe Lushaba worked in Studios Kabako on an album in 2017. This resulted in the music theatre production Not Another Diva..., in which he and Lushaba go in search of the diva’s other, all-but-glamorous story. ‘I want Studios Kabako to be an acupunctural point,’ Linyekula says, ‘knowing that we can connect to other points elsewhere in the city, country or in the world. I sometimes jokingly call myself an acupuncturist.’ This is perhaps Linyekula’s primary motivation: the hope that with small interventions in the right place, art can have great implications. It is also his main reason for coming to Amsterdam and organising a theatrical moving performance in the Bijlmer district, Parlement Debout, as well as presenting solos by young, Congolese creators at Frascati theatre during the festival. Ideally he would like to transform the theatre into a Dutch version of his Studios Kabako, where people walk in and out, eat, chat and, if possible, take part in a performance or party. NOTES Faustin Linyekula created The Dialogue Series III: Dinozord in Vienna in 2006. This commission for American director Peter Sellars’ New Crowned Hope Festival was later also shown in Avignon, at Springdance in Utrecht and in Paris Quartier d’été. Sur les traces de Dinozord is a remake of this performance, which is now on show for the first time in the Netherlands, with a brand new cast of young dancers. It is thirteen years later. The original artistic team is now spread all over the world, travelling between the Congo, France and Sweden. In this performance they return to the ruins of Kisangani, Democratic Republic of Congo, previously known as Zaire, the Belgian Congo and the Congo Free State. They go in search of a new story, new hope under the surface of names and places. Antoine Vumilia Muhindo, a Congolese actor, writer, director and former political prisoner has been involved since its beginning in 2006 and joined the cast in 2012 when Linyekula revisited the first version. Among other themes, his story addresses his involvement in the Kabila resistance movement against Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator who ruled the Congo for thirty-two years and during his reign changed the country’s name to Zaire, and his sentence to death after Kabila’s murder by one of his body guards. The cast includes singer Hlengiwe Lushaba, dancers Yves Mwamba, Michel Kiyombo and Jeannot Kumbonyeki, all trained by Studios Kabako in Kisangani, and actor Papy Maurice Mbwiti. In addition to the many movement scenes – solos and duets – the performers drag a red trunk over the stage, from which papers are continually falling. These are the notes of Richard Kabako, poet and close childhood friend of Linyekula. Kabako was a young man with great writing ambitions who died of bubonic plague. As a tribute, Linyekula named his company and studio after his friend: Studios Kabako. The stories and memories give him a posthumous presence in the performance. Also absent (although performing in the parade performance Parlement Debout at this festival) is the person who gave his name to the show: Dinozord, ‘the last of his kind’. This Congolese dancer, who appeared in the original in 2006, speaks here only via projected text. Which stories stick and which disappear? We should not forget where we come from. Dinozord’s memories and Richard Kabako are kept alive in Linyekula’s Sur les traces de Dinozord, his ultimate attempt to create a new story from the ruins of a country, built on their shared lives ABOUT THE ARTIST Faustin Linyekula (Congo, 1974) is a Together with four dancers who were Congolese dancer, choreographer, the- trained by him, he created Spectacularly atre maker and storyteller. In his work he Empty, an account of his return to his addresses the legacy of decades of war, native country. It was the first in a series of terror, fear and the collapse of the econ- works in which Linyekula reflected on the omy in Africa.