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Report: Avignon festival

African theatre hits Avignon

The African presence at the Avignon Festival is exceptional this year. Starting with a four-hour play from DRC that took 11 years to write, bringing Alsatians on stage in a South African performance and taking in artists from Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria.

Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon
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Ten years ago the main "In" festival directors started involving leading stage directors when they decided on the festival programme artist.

This year, for the first time, one of them comes from an African country.

Unsuprisingly, the influence of Congolese Dieudonné Niangona on the programme is noticeable.

In this first week of the three-week long festival, his own four-hour play Sheda, occupied the Carrière Boulbon.

Sheda, which he wrote over 11 years and which originally lasted more than seven hours, is based on recent history in his home region, and his own multitude of thoughts on life, death and the world.

Artists from Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and South Africa have taken a fair chunk of the Avignon Festival stages with their writing, directing and performing.

Mamela Nyamza and Faniswa Yisa from South Africa's 19-Born–76 Rebels is playing in a morning section of the festival in the shady courtyard of the Lycée Saint Joseph until 14 July.

It’s also part of the year of France-South Africa cultural exchanges.

The two women from Cape Town put on a fully clothed, colourful show whose costumes contrast sharply with the one that precedes it in stage-fashionable stone colours and bare or almost-bare torsos as part of the Sujets à Vif Programme A.

The title of their work refers to the year they were born, when the Soweto uprising occurred in a black township in South Africa.

Nyamza says, “in our mothers’ wombs we felt everything. We are the new generation of black South Africans, especially of women who had no models to emulate.”

In a simple and elegant manner, their polished gesture and mime, using national flag colours as evocative dramatic signs and walking on tin cans, they tell the audience in just half an hour a lot about the where South Africa has come from and where it is today With the help of two German Shepherd dogs, called Gavin and Sunny, they give a hint at what their daily life under apartheid was like.

Until 16 July one dancer/choreographer in search of a story takes the audience at the Avignon Festival to his native Democratic Republic of Congo in Drums and Digging.

Austin Linyekula, who has performed in Avignon before, starts off telling the spectators in the Célestins cloisters about his own journey to the village where he spent his early years, to find fresh inspiration.

He meets the former percussion master. He recounts how that meeting makes him realise he has to dig, like a drummer, to make the drum resonate anew.

The piece performed by six people and Linyekula mixes traditional and contemporary dance. Four of them dance and three are voices, one is a traditional Mongo singer, one a rapper. And there are long silences.

It’s Linyekula’s third time at the Avignon Festival.

This year, his offering is more subdued, lending itself more to reflection and, despite the six others on stage, a highly personal work.

Qudus Onikeku, Emil Abossolo Mbo and friends bring a mixture of cultures and spirituality to the mediaeval city of the Popes.

With lyric singing, vibrant cello and electric guitar, they contemplate transmission from generation to generation, with the colonial period of Nigeria’s history considered as a hiatus in Qaddish.

Opening mid-week, at the Gymnase du Lycée Saint Joseph, Ivorian artists, working with Monika Gintersdorfer and Knut Klassen from Germany, perform three pieces, dance and theatre. The spectator can choose to see them as a whole, marathon-style from 3.00pm till 9.00pm with breaks or opt for the one-a-day version.

Logobi 5, is a semi-improvisation based on an encounter between the Logobi street-dance form with Franck Edmond Yao (aka Gadoukou la Star), and Richard Siegal, who worked with a master of contemporary Western dance, William Forsyth. La Fin du Western (The End of the Western), is a political play, pitching different opinions and La Jet Set, taken from the name of the famous group, stems out of the lively club scene in Abidjian.

“During the political crisis, the night clubs kept going," Gintersdorffer remarks. "People who supported opposite parties just got on with their nightlife inside the same club. The political divisions weren’t invited.”

Since 2002 she and Klassen spend part of the year in Abidjian.

"If you ask me if things are better now, I couldn’t say.," she says. "The Western powers backed one man over another, maybe the roads improved, but for freedom of expression, for example, I don’t know.”

Logobi 05, La Fin du Western, La Jet Set run until 14 July.

Amongst other productions from African artists, Stefan Kaegi from Switzerland, whose preoccupations are the effects of economic practices and human interaction in a fast-changing world, presents Lagos Business Angels with a cast from Nigeria.

It runs on 14 July till 17 July.

The play takes place at a trade fair and through meetings with Nigerian businesspeople sets out to banish the post-colonial clichés about north-south dependency and to show how the local people are active, and creative, in building their economies.

African performance art is also represented in more than one way in films at the Utopia cinema and readings (RFI’s Ca va, ça va l’Afrique at the Jardin de la Rue Mons from 11 till 16 July),

At the Avignon Festival, at least, Ca va, ça va l’Afrique (Africa’s doing well).

(see our “World news explained” section in “Features” on this site for interviews with the artists).

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