As a palangi/pakeha writer I am privileged to attend and review Lemi Ponifasio’s curation for the first week of the New Zealand Festival of the Arts.

The works presented bring to mind the words of street artist Banksy: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

The theatre space has been decolonised and filled with indigenous voices. [More]

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Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

A central motif of Faustin Linyekula’s In Search of Dinozord is a large red tin trunk stuffed with the torn remnants of the poet Kabako’s writing. Late in the piece, we discover Kabako left Kisangani (in 1993) and died of bubonic plague near the border of Uganda. Linyekula was a friend of Kabako and named his Studios Kabako, in Kisangani, after him.

The trunk of shredded memories provokes me to ransack the fragments of my own African experiences by way of comparing what I thought I knew then with what this show reveals. Please bear with me, as these recollections and subsequent investigations also give context to what we witness in this challenging work, delivered in five languages: French, Swahili, English, Dance and Visual – with song and sound, both live and recorded, compounding its visceral energy and power.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was called Zaire when I trekked through it in 1976, with 18 others, rough-camping off the back of a Bedford truck. We had started in Nairobi, enjoyed the conservation parks of Tanzania, including the paleoanthropological importance of Olduvai Gorge, marvelled at the fertility of Rwanda where steep slopes were cultivated with crops and everyone (all Hutu, I now realise) seemed to be genuinely happy wielding their implements and waving at us (not a hint of the revolution of 1959 let alone the dreadful carnage that the Tutsi v Hutu civil war of 1990 would bring).

A volcanic eruption in Zaire had blocked our planned entry point from Rwanda and caused us to detour, briefly we thought, through Idi Amin’s Uganda. A misunderstanding at the boarder led to our being chased and detained while the truck was searched by armed soldiers, and we all knew two paperback books of Idi cartoons had been passed around (they were safely tucked down people’s trousers). “You English,” they said, lumping our many white nationalities together, “you create these false borders then break your own rules!” Obliged to make camp on a green called, ironically, Travellers’ Rest, until the borders re-opened, we organised a watch roster throughout the night.

By the time we got to Kisangani, capital of Zaire’s Tshopo province (and now home to Studios Kabako), we were well behind schedule, so, next morning with the truck repacked and ready to go, the driver went to renegotiate things with officials. I went for a stroll – and was drawn to the sound of drumming.

A crowd of locals was clustered around an open portal in the wall of a bland concrete building – watching a dance-theatre rehearsal. Cheekily I flashed my dog-eared International Theatre Institute card and gained entry in time to observe the last few moments. But the soldier in charge told me they would do a full run in a few minutes and I and some friends were welcome to watch. This was an army troupe and they were “dancing the story of the revolution”. My abiding memory is of a super-fit soldier in desert camo uniform complete with heavy boots dancing the lead role vigorously and non-stop for about 90 minutes. It was very upbeat and quite mesmerising.

In my ignorance, I had no idea what revolution was being celebrated and of course I couldn’t Google for information then. Wiki now tells me that on “25 November 1965, Army Chief of Staff Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who later renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko, officially came into power through a coup d’état. In 1971, he renamed the country Zaire.” His program of ‘Zaireanisation’ sought to delete the lingering vestiges of French colonialism and resist the continuing influence of Western culture by creating a singular national identity. I doubt the dance we witnessed acknowledged that the country was being run “as a dictatorial one-party state, with his Popular Movement of the Revolution as the sole legal party” or that “Mobutu’s government received considerable support from the United States, due to its anti-communist stance during the Cold War.” But that might be why we felt so welcome.

It would be the early 1990s before Mobutu’s government began to weaken, at which point Tutsi FPR-ruled Rwanda led the invasion which began the ‘First Congo War’ that installed Laurent-Désiré Kabila as President. It was he who reclaimed ‘Democratic Republic of the Congo’ as the country’s name.

Within a year the ‘Second Congo War’ erupted, ultimately involving nine African countries and around twenty armed groups, resulting in the deaths of 5.4 million people and the assassination of President Kabila by one of his bodyguards. He was succeeded by his son, Joseph Kabila who, “while in power,” according to Wiki, “faced continuous wars in eastern Congo and internal rebel forces supported by the neighbouring governments of Uganda and Rwanda.” He stepped down in 2018 and died last year.

So whither the artist throughout such a war-torn history? In a November 2016 Frieze feature by Sean O’Toole, choreographer Linyekula’s work is described as “fundamentally about the complications of subjectivity and the obligations of citizenship in a collapsed political order where remedy, however small, lies in collective action.” From a public interview at a Goethe Institute symposium, African Futures, held in Johannesburg in late 2015, he quotes Linyekula: “I don’t see the future changing with the current structure of the predatory state. I know the state will never help us, but their capacity of nuisance is so big that they can stop any project. In such a context, I cannot say: ‘Fuck the state!’ That will be signing up for the end of everything, including my own life.” O’Toole continues, “His solution has been to activate small ‘spaces of resistance’, as he calls them. ‘My response is not political, in that it’s not programmatic,’ he stated in a 2005 interview with the online magazine Ballet-Dance.”

The article reveals that Linyekula first channelled Kabako in his 2011 solo dance piece Le Cargo, “a biographical work exploring the impact of Congo’s collective history on his sinuous body.” And when he delivered a ‘lecture-demonstration’ in Minneapolis, later that year, from the open mouth of a large freight elevator, Linyekula declared: “My work is spoken of as dance, theatre, music, noise, agitation, whatever. What do I know? Most of the time I feel like someone who has escaped some catastrophe and whose heritage is a pile of ruins.”

In Search of Dinozord, then, evokes Linyekula’s struggle to retrieve something of value from those ruins. Dinozord, it emerges, was a play taken from Kisangani 14 years ago (commissioned by Peter Sellars for the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna 2006 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart, whose Requiem is part of the show). Again I am indebted to Sean O’Toole for amplification: “One of Linyekula’s earliest works to disinter the memory of Kabako is the ensemble piece, Dinozord: The Dialogue Series III (2006). The title is a reference to both the hybrid Power Rangers machines (1993 ongoing) and the hip-hop dancer and rapper Dinozord, an associate artist of Studios Kabako.”

Faustin Linyekula channels Kabako in whiteface, to indicate, I take it, he’s dead. (By the end of the 80-minute show, everyone is in whiteface.) Linyekula’s attempt to sing the poet into existence is drowned by an ever-increasing cacophony, as is the one-fingered typing of the writer in the shadows behind him, represented by Antoine Vumilia Muhindo. Kabako can also be seen as a metaphor for the whole sorry state of the DMR.

In the silence that follows, and throughout, Papy Maurice Mbwiti speaks the verbal dimension of story-telling. And singer Hlengiwe Madlala brings her extraordinary voice to an African version of Mozart’s Requiem. Three more dancers – Jean Kumbonyeki, Yves Mwamba and Michel Kiyombo – manifest the disorientation, agonies and catatonic states that accompany their search.

Projected text, presumably exhumed from what remains of Kabako’s writings, tells us “God wanted to dance but resisted because everyone was watching” – hence the internal struggle depicted by the dancers’ rippling, vibrating torsos. When the big red trunk is dragged centre stage and opened, spilling its guts of torn-up texts, a dancer collapses behind it and another gently attempts to stroke life back into his body. This becomes a recurring image.

The youthful ambition of Kabako, Linyekula and Dinozord, to revolutionise African literature and theatre, will resonate with many young artists but few will directly relate their subsequent experiences to the fates that befell them in the face of rosy revolutionary promises made by dictatorial regimes.

Almost imperceptibly, amid the chaos of fractured sound, voice, body and projected imagery, a coherent awareness emerges of how unending warfare, and the imprisonment, torture, poverty and sickness that inevitably accompanies it, damages the creative spirit. And yet In Search of Dinozord proves it cannot be eliminated: it exemplifies the artists’ capacity to respond to atrocity with creations that reflect man’s inhumanity to man yet gives us hope by their very existence.  

To compare my mid-70s trek with what I’ve experienced here is to admit how cocooned we are in the privileged First World, even as we tread the very soil that’s soaked in bloody history. How grateful we must always be that the arts, and arts festivals such as this, can awaken us to realities beyond our lived experiences.

(Although a lot of the spoken text is translated on screen, it has to be noted that anyone fluent in French will have a distinct advantage.)

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