The “Festival” was both performance and interactive party, for and with the audience. Food, beer, and live music by the New Mexican band Wagogo Banda, worked to create a more global interaction within this piece. We share the same space with dictators, the Belgian king, and revolutionary leaders in the Congo, but, as Linyekula said, “I don’t want to make this performance a funeral, so let’s make it a party: we need to feel good to talk about these things [slavery, bloody massacres, and the general exploitation of Africans.] I don’t want anyone to cry, be sad. I just want ‘it’ to stop.” The audience sat on two sides of the performance space, deleting any aspect of a proscenium theater, and were invited to dance, eat and drink before, during, and after the concert itself.

    Dancers Papy Ebotani and Djodjo Kazadi joined Linyekula in movement that flowed from the spine, manipulating bars of neon lights to shape and reshape the stage area into circles of conflict, death, or constructing piles beneath human bodies. Actress Marie-Louise Bibish Mumbu moved slowly about the stage, as though meditating on the action of the men, then speaking the text of her poetry about everyday human concerns. She was the only female voice, quietly commenting aside from the raucous speeches of the male politicians. Speaking of her unfulfilled desire to vote, she said, “I hear that the drivers in escorts are different from those running the country. Should this make us feel more secure? I’m fed up with this, I want to vote, I’ve had the right to vote for ten years but I never did it. There has never been an election.”

   Manipulation of bodies, like puppets or tools of exploitation, became a physical metaphor. Within a lighted circle dancers were stripped of clothing, thrust each other to the floor, or twisted bodies into sculpted shapes, their faces molded into grotesque masks. All this as speeches proclaim a democracy that never evolves. At one point Linyekula covers his ears and yells out for silence from the voices.

    A garbage collection of body parts of broken dolls were manipulated on a table, and handbills about the various revolutionary/dictatorial politicians were handed out to the audience as more “garbage.” When the audience is asked to stand for the national anthem, we stood as Linyekula exclaimed that there were at least five, one for each dictator or king, and which one would we like to sing?

    History, philosophy, and cultural awareness were melded into what can be described as extremely effective performance art, or somatic theatre. Linyekula’s humor and passion created a stirring experience. He is being presented with the 2007 Principal Prince Claus Award next month for outstanding choreography by Prince Constantijn in the Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ in Amsterdam.

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