Looking for the Truth When It Keeps Changing

The New York Times
By ROSLYN SULCAS
Published: November 17, 2007

“This is a piece of fiction,” Faustin Linyekula says at the start of “Festival of Lies,” which opened on Wednesday night at Bricstudio in Brooklyn. “But one thing is indisputably real: the food and the bar.”

The food, by the South African restaurant Madiba, and the bar were indeed real, and Bricstudio was set up like a cafe, with tables around a slightly elevated stage. But a lot more felt authentic in “Festival of Lies,” a rambling but immensely appealing work by Mr. Linyekula, who was born in Congo.

Or was Mr. Linyekula born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as it is called now? Or Zaire, as it was when he was born in 1974? His country’s ever-changing political identity, from Belgian colony to independent state to dictatorship, and then more dictatorship, is one of the themes that pervade this two-hour work. But Mr. Linyekula isn’t really interested in giving us a history lesson. Just as politics are an ever-changing but unchanging backdrop to people’s lives in his country, the dictators’ and politicians’ voices that alternate with the jazzy, African-influenced music of the New York-based band Asiko become an interchangeable blur of propaganda and nationalism.

“We are going to invent the Kinshasa week,” says Mary-Louise Bibish Mumbu, an actress who stalks the periphery of the area occupied by the three male dancers, occasionally taking center stage. “Mondays to Wednesdays would be our business days; Thursdays would be for riots; Fridays would be reserved for the coups d’état.”

Ms. Mumbu, speaking with deadpan poetic grace, provides the antidote to the male voices that resound as the dancers — Papy Ebotani, Djodjo Kazadi and Mr. Linyekula — move in and out of the performance space, manipulating long tubes of fluorescent light that they use to create pathways, boundaries or cumbersome burdens.

Their movement is frequently weighted and fraught, their bodies crushing together as if in a rugby scrum, heads down, hands and feet on the floor. At other times each dancer moves lightly, with rippling undulations through the torso, little twists of shoulders and hips, shivery, squirmy spurts of motion.

The effect, amid the orations and the propagation of national identities, is to show the individual, the body, as the center of all experience, the repository of vulnerability and power. This is all I know, Mr. Linyekula seems to say — the only truth I can offer.