Performing Acupuncture on a Necropolitical Body: Choreographer Faustin Linyekula’s Studios Kabako in Kisangani, Democratic Republic of Congo

Photo 1.

Faustin Linyekula in Festival of Lies. Photo by Agathe Poupeney.

Faustin Linyekula stages what I shall call “geo-choreography” in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). What is choreography if not an embodied practice that demands a continual reordering of space? Geo-choreography reorders the urban landscape choreographically without colonizing it. Instead, it establishes a network of architectural sites within that landscape whose effect I shall endeavor to describe in this essay. In 1993 Congolese choreographer Linyekula went into exile for eight years, during which time he attended university in Kenya and studied theater in London, only to be pressured by the British government to return to Kenya, where he was introduced to dance theater. In 2001 Linyekula returned to the DRC, where he founded his contemporary dance company, Studios Kabako, in Kinshasa, the country’s capital.¹ Working out of both Kinshasa and Paris, Linyekula established an international career as an experimental dance maker. After five years (in 2006) he transferred his company from Kinshasa to his hometown, Kisangani. Located in the northeastern DRC, this haunted urban terrain has been devastated by political violence, including that of the Second Congo War (1998–2003) and its aftermath.² In trying to rediscover a sense of belonging for himself and for others, Linyekula is presently designing a network of studios for emerging artists throughout Kisangani. Linyekula’s dance company and network of studios taken together, and housed under the same name of Studios Kabako, encourage a fluid movement between the social and the artistic.

Working in and across the urban landscape, Linyekula’s geo-choreography recontextualizes multiple spaces and forms of cultural production. For example, he places popular performance forms in theaters that normally present contemporary dance, and he brings contemporary dance into parts of Kisangani steeped in popular culture. One repeated component of Linyekula’s spatial recontextualizations is ndombolo, a popular form of Congolese music, as well as the popular dance form it has inspired. Postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe and anthropologist Filip De Boeck have interpreted these forms as part of a culture of death. They attribute its force and popularity to the false promise of hope offered by its driving sounds and material ostentatiousness. Ndombolo is the sonic and corporeal practice that best exemplifies the DRC as a necropolitical state. Furthermore, both commentators see it as a musical culture that mimics the contentious nature of war. Linyekula’s current work for both his dance company and his studio workshops consciously engages with ndombolo in an attempt to reconfigure its bellicose associations.

Choreography, Ndombolo, and the Culture of Death

In cities such as Kinshasa, generational order has been disrupted by mass killings. Society is increasingly shaped by a youth culture defined by—and continuously reappropriating— horror. Living with death characterizes a society subsumed by what Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” or “the power of death.” “Necropolitics and necropower,” explains Mbembe, “account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (2003, 39–40; emphasis in the original). For Mbembe, ndombolo and the dancing it engenders is born of necropolitical social conditions. In his essay “Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds” (2007), Mbembe theorizes the aesthetics of violence that informs ndombolo: “[Congolese] music ‘breaks bones’ . . . and ‘hurls bodies’ . . . causing women and men to ‘behave like snakes’. . . . The body is not so much ‘harmed’ as it becomes a site of transgression, the locus of a blurring—between the transcendental and the empirical, the material and the psychic” (2007). In his most recent works for the stage, Linyekula has drawn from the energy of ndombolo music in order to explore the carnal possibilities central to ndombolo’s power and popularity. “For...