Avignon via Afrique

Africa finds a place in the 61st Avignon Festival, incarnated by two performers: Dieudonné Niangouna of the Congo Republic, author and performer of “Attitude Clando”, and Faustin Linyekula, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who brings two shows, “Le Festival des Mensonges” and “Dinozord”. Their presence here is remarkable, opening what is traditionally a European-centered program to the daily realities and challenges to creation in contemporary Africa and giving the diverse public to Avignon an opportunity it might not otherwise have or choose to see African theater. If their first experience of African performance is “Attitude Clando”, however, they may be falsely impressed by an apparent poverty of means - a stark set of a smoldering bed of coals under a weakly lit spotlight - when what this tightly-written monologue surprisingly exposes is the author’s affective distance from the struggle of illegal immigrants in Europe. More social marginal than clandestine worker, the individual who growls to an unseen doctor the story of his angry resistance to the life of the man whose papers are in order and can freely circulate in society - “l’homme réglo” – rejects society itself, or in Niangouna’s own words, “refuses the qualities attributed to a human being and the very reason for being or for resisting the forms of social governance”. The “Clandestine Attitude” he espouses is, he has written, “not to be legal but to be free as the wind”. A nihilistic individualism is what motivates the shadowy figure between two points of light, and not a desire to make a better life for himself or his family, motivations more commonly associated with clandestine movement across borders. The piece consequently reads more as a statement on African realities – a cry for freedom from all forms of oppression – than on the ability of North and South to meet each other honestly. An exhibit at the Ecole d’Art of photos taken of Niangouna in Brazzaville evokes a similarly solitary and marginal existence.

Photo: "Attitude Clando", by Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d'Avignon