Faustin Linyekula
Sinopsis
The Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) closes in great style with the debut performance of Faustin Linyekula: More more more… future. During the three weeks of the festival, we have seen more shows with positive messages than with negative ones, but we weren’t expecting the most beautiful lesson of hope to come from Kisangani (Catherine Makereel, Le Soir, Brussels)
The bastard child of the rumba, of traditional rhythms, of the brass bands playing at the church on Sundays and of funk, ndombolo is the music of the nights of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The sound is dense and saturated, the audience drink beer and eat kebabs, dance and flirt until the early hours, when the first transports start up again in the sleepy city.
It is about their successes that the musicians sing: the power brought by money, pretty women, fast cars, designer clothes.
Why not use the extraordinary energy of the guitars and voices of ndombolo? – this was what the choreographer Faustin Linyekula thought – not to spread dreams that are as flimsy as the paper handkerchiefs sold in the streets of Kinshasa, but to talk about real life with its difficulties, obstacles and mistakes. I’m thinking about the energy of the punk movement in Europe and the United States, and about how the young people took possession of music to decree the end of the future. Here, in the Congo, it is difficult to reject a future that we have never had, to destroy our pile of ruins even more… just to dream, with our feet placed firmly on the ground, that it is possible to build on these ruins a little more of a future…