REDCAT Performing Arts Season Begins with FAUSTIN LINYEKULA

CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, presents the riveting and elegant work of Congolese choreographer and writer Faustin Linyekula/Studio Kabako,Thursday, September 28 to Saturday, September 30, 2017.

In a special limited engagement immediately following the U.S. premiere of the production in New York, REDCAT is proud to present Sur les traces de Dinozord (In Search of Dinozord), a dance-theatre work that nurtures hope in the face of the ongoing legacy of war and ruin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Scored with fragments of Mozart's Requiem, metronomic taps on a typewriter, and live vocals by rising opera star Serge Kakudji, Sur les traces de Dinozord is a poetic, political fairy tale that begins, like all fairy tales, with "Once Upon a time..." From there, Linyekula and his exceptional performers embark on a deeply personal journey as they search for the essence of their dreams. Through exquisite movement and text, they delve into the wrenching history of the Congo and their own childhood stories, as they mourn the loss of a friend. In the process, they hope to fashion a new kind of myth that is a truer reflection of their lives.

Sur les traces de Dinozord is an adaptation of a 2006 work commissioned by celebrated director Peter Sellars for the New Crowned Hope Festival. The gripping work pays homage to the murdered Congolese political prisoner Antoine Vumilia Muhindo. In Sellars own words:

"I first met Faustin as an emerging artist 15 years ago and I commissioned him to make a work to commemorate the 250th birthday of Mozart in the city of Vienna. Faustin responded with a clear-eyed, shattering, and ennobling work which repurposed and reimagined the Mozart Requiem to describe the killings in Kisangani and their aftermath and to trace the fates of his dispersed colleagues. The Viennese were stunned. This is the major work that Faustin now brings to REDCAT. "

Faustin Linyekula is a choreographer and performer with a "live-wire intensity" (The New York Times). His riveting work often addresses themes of memory, forgetting, and dreams. With his country's history as a catalyst, he considers the impact that decades of war, trauma, and economic uncertainty have on people's lives. His city Kisingane, is dubbed "the city of sorrow," where millions have been massacred by the Ugandan and Rwandan armies which surround it, fighting for natural resources such as coltan, which are exported for use in cell phones. Dance and storytelling are a personal response. After training and performing in Europe, Faustin decided he had to return home in 2001 to establish a studio as a place of hope.

As The New York Times wrote in a large feature on Linyekula on September 5, 2017:
"His home country is 'quite a messy place' beset by massacres and wars that never really end, where 'if 100 people die, it is not news.' In such a place, imagining any future, much less a better one, is an exercise of extreme will. 'I have to fight for it,' he said. 'I have to invent it.' His approach is not a physical technique so much as 'a way of thinking about who we are,' a form of poetry and storytelling written with the body. 'My dance is about who I am," he said."

Linyekula founded the Studios Kabako in 2001. Based in Kisangani, DRCongo, the company fosters young artists, acts as a laboratory for the development of theater, dance, music, film, and video, engages in local community initiatives, and supports the touring of Linyekula's work worldwide. Faustin and Studio Kabako have won design awards, such as the Curry Stone Prize for his work reinvigorating the community by providing opportunity and resources for people. When Faustin trains dancers, he also makes sure that they are fed, and given food and money to support their families. He is also working with an international architect to develop a map of the water supply for his hometown, where 200,000 residents do not have treated water: "Maybe the most important thing is not art, maybe it is to create a set where we can being to believe in something in a context where it is so difficult to believe in anything. If that is art, then I love that. I would like to continue." - Faustin Linyekula

In 2012 Friends and artistic collaborators Faustin Linyekula and celebrated stage director Peter Sellars came together on the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street to speak about each other's work and the power of the arts as an agent for social and political change. https://vimeo.com/51224208.

Linyekula has performed in New York at MoMA, The Met, NYU's Skirball Center and at REDCAT in 2007 and 2011.

Sur Les Traces du Dinozord.
Performed in French with English supertitles.
Director: Faustin Linyekula
With: Serge Kakudji (singer); Jean Kumbonyeki Deba, Papy Ebotani, Yves Mwamba Bakadiasa, Faustin Linyekula (dancers); Papy Maurice Mbwiti, Antoine Vumilia Muhindo (actors)

Text: Richard Kabako, Antoine Vumilia Muhindo
Music: WA Mozart (Requiem, excerpts), Charles Lwanga Choir of Kisangani Joachim Montessuis (Nierica), Arvo Pärt (Pari Intervallo, Redeuntes in mi, Trivium, Annum per Annum), Jimi Hendricks (Voodoo Chile)
Production: Studios Kabako / Virginie Dupray
Co-production: KVS Theater, Brussels.

With support from the DRAC Ile-de-France / French Ministry of Culture and Communication.

Made possible with support from French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF).

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