Faustin Linyekula

ABOUT "MORE MORE MORE... FUTURE" presented at brut Wien in the frameWORK of Wiener Festwochen

Material from a conversation with Michikazu Matsune

“Music has always been a great source of inspiration for me. Recently I started looking at music not artistically but as a social phenomenon. Because my work is deeply inscribed in the context of Congo. In such a country, in such a society, what kind of a role does music play? Isn’t music today the last space for dreams for most people? Our heroes are musicians. Singers. Politicians have lost their credibility for a long time now… It doesn’t mean that musicians are credible but still they can make people dream. Which is definitely not the case with politicians… I thought I should make a piece, a choreography of sound and music and energy, and see how bodies would survive in the middle of all that. It also became important for me, after having worked around the idea of history and memory for many years, to ask other questions: How can I dance now? Have I really danced in all these years when trying to understand history and tell stories? How do I move on? What’s the next step?

The title, “more more more… future” was there from the very beginning. One “more” was not enough, it had to be more, more and more! I must look forward but I also must move forward. To deny future would be to go in the same direction as politicians. No, this is definitely about future! Of course, the title also reminds one of the punk-rock slogan “no future”. Indeed my idea was to inject a punk attitude in Congolese music and musicians, to contaminate the system and to shake the house. So I invited the guitarist Flamme Kapaya, a huge star of ndombolo music in Congo. I’ve known Flamme for quite some time now, he made us dance during his years with Werrason, one of the most famous ndombolo singers in Congo. But it was all about partying and showing off… At the same time, there is this incredible energy and all our work and dialogue together was about how to use this energy to say something else!

We listened to different music, from Bad Brains, a Washington DC black punk group, to Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, the heroic era of rock before it became mainstream, we also listened to John Cage.
I also knew the two singers of the project: Pasnas is a rap artist from Kisangani, the city I live in in Congo, he already worked with me as an actor in a previous piece “La Fratrie errante” and we are also producing his personal work as a rap artist. Le Coq, the other singer, is part of a ndombolo group in Kisangani too. Patou the drummer is from Kisangani, Rémi the bass player is from Brussels. I invited all these artists from different backgrounds to build this project with me under the musical direction of Flamme.

The texts are from the Congolese poet Antoine Vumilia Muhindo. Antoine is from Kisangani and it’s with Antoine I started to write and dream about changing African theatre and literature – we were only 15 then!
Now he is a political prisoner, in jail in Kinshasa for nine years. I asked him to write and think about “more more more… future”, what that could mean for him… And he wrote the text of the five songs.
In my previous piece, “Dinozord: The Dialogue Series iii” created in 2006, I tell his story. In the mid-90s in Congo a strong rebel movement rose up against president Mobutu. I was not in Congo at that time, otherwise I assume I would have joined the movement too. Antoine did. Laurent Désiré Kabila took Kinshasa and overthrew president Mobutu within a few months. And Antoine got an important position, working for the Présidence’s information agency. And when president Kabila was murdered in January 2001, Antoine was arrested with others and sentenced to death.
Antoine’s background story is not mentioned in the programme because I didn’t want to put this issue at the forefront of the piece. I want the audience to simply confront with his words, with his poetic images.
Recently, a journalist did a long interview with him following a performance of the piece in Luxembourg; it did attract some attention. Each time we are performing he receives a fee – both pieces gave him a kind of financial independence which is the condition of survival in Congolese jails where you have to pay for everything, your food, medical attention, even your own cell!, and Antoine is now registered at the SACD.
At the same time, I am afraid to attract too much attention to him. He is in jail. They could do anything they want with him. Yet, I think it’s significant that his text in the piece starts with “I am not afraid”.

This piece is not directly about politics but through music, we do talk about our society, how to look at it and how to look at “us” in the middle of this chaos. It’s may be less openly political than my former pieces but I feel that throwing out aspiration and hope and fear of our generation is a way of being political in an indirect way.

The authorities in Congo consider my career abroad as something positive. “You are an ambassador. You contribute to the good image of our country out there” and so on. It’s fine with me. Mostly they don’t care about thinking. They are not very sensitive to poetry, which is maybe a good thing… At least until now I’ve not been in trouble. But you never know. A lot of human right activists, journalists, even priests – the Catholic Church is really political in Congo – disappeared over the last years, some of them were shot at night in front of their homes…
So I need to make a clear distinction between what I say in my work and what I say about the work in an interview, especially in certain media. If I talk to Radio France Internationale for instance, a media that is largely followed by people in charge, I have to be very careful. But what is in my piece just flies over their head. I feel I am respected there but they don’t really understand what I am doing. For them it’s like, “what’s this?“
One of the big issues in Congo is that the rules are not known. You don’t know what could be held against you. A thing that is tolerated today could be considered as high treason tomorrow.
The rules are in the hand of those in power, and they change together with them… Nowadays the regime is really sensitive to critics. So it’s how to say what you have to say without being killed. You have to find strategies as artists did under communist regimes… We need to protect ourselves, if I get killed and sent to jail, I will be of no use to anyone.

It’s essential to delimitate your territory. I am an artist but I am a citizen. I don’t want to get involved in politics, but at my level, I try to make some changes. With the Studios Kabako, I am working on the development of art centres in the city of Kisangani, the city I grew up in and where I now work and live. It’s a way to be a citizen and to make some difference, very locally, for a few… One of the terrible things in Congo and in many other African countries too is that whenever there is a problem we always expect a solution from outside. We are still in a colonial state as every legitimacy comes from outside. Some people are making huge profits with the country but the very great majority of the population is literally starving. People are dying because they don’t have 20 dollars to treat malaria. How could I make people around me aware of what is going on? We should prove to ourselves that things could be different. This is how I am political I suppose, just to make people around me realize that if we don’t want to leave the country, we need to find ways at our small scale to make a difference.

In August we will start foundations of the residency/lab centre we want to build 8 kilometers from Kisangani. It will include a recording and mastering studio, two music rehearsing spaces, a video post-production studio, a large rehearsal studio for dance and theatre, as well as administrative and technical spaces, and accommodation for visiting artists. We are working together with the German architect Bärbel Müller who has been living in Vienna for many years now. Our idea is to consider architecture as acupuncture: how to generate a circulation of energies in the city through different architecture projects? This first venue should be complemented by a performing venue right in the centre of the city and by a community space at Lubunga on the other side of the Congo river which flows through the city – the most populated but also the most neglected area of Kisangani.

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Born in Congo (then called Zaire), Faustin Linyekula is a dancer and choreographer. He left Congo at the age of 19 for Kenya where he founded the Gàara dance company together with Opiyo Okach. Back in Congo in 2001, he created the Studios Kabako, a place dedicated to performing arts. In 2006, the Studios Kabako moved to Kisangani; since then has accompanied local artists in the field of music, video, dance and theatre. Faustin’s work has been extensively shown in Europe, Africa and the United States. He is now working on a theatre piece based on the French classical play “Bérénice” by Jean Racine which will be presented at the 2010 Avignon Festival.

Michikazu Matsune was born in Japan and lives in Austria. His performance works often appear in unique formats such as a shop for selling performances or a demonstration. He is currently working on a stage piece using sign language with people who suffer from hearing difficulties.

(2010-05-27)