Coup Fatal

In 2009, the young Congolese countertenor Serge Kakudji (1989) gave an impressive performance at the Holland Festival in pitié!, a piece by the Flemish director Alain Platel. This year, both Kakudji

and Platel are back with Coup Fatal, a collaboration between Kakudji, the Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg (Royal Flemish Theatre, KVS) and Platel's les ballets C de la B. Using the vocal parts of the music of various baroque composers, including Handel and Gluck, Coup Fatal creates a new, contemporary universe of sound, resulting in an exuberant, organic whole of baroque phrases, Congolese pop, rock, jazz and traditional music, driven by Kakudji's high, distinctive voice. In his characteristic surrealist way, Platel, supported by dancer and assistant director Romain Guion, creates a theatrical dimension for the music.

The performance had its beginnings in a project connected with the second edition of Connexion Kin in 2010, the KVS arts festival in Kinshasa, Congo. KVS Congo co-ordinator Paul Kerstens teamed up with Kakudji to initiate an unusual exchange between Western and Congolese music, taking a number of classical baroque arias as their starting point and developing the project into a full-fledged production in the spring of 2014.

At the age of seven Kakudji was hit 'like a meteorite' by an opera scene he saw on television and subsequently set himself the goal of becoming an opera singer. Having followed a number of workshops and singing contests, Kakudji, essentially self-taught and still in his teens, caused a sensation at the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna in 2006, singing a number of vocal parts by Mozart in a performance called Dialogue Series: Dinozord III. His raw talent was further honed whilst studying at the Institut Musicale et Pédagogique in the Belgian town of Namur and at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de St. Maur-des-Fossés in Paris. In 2008 Kakudji performed in pitié!, Alain Platel's interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach's Matthäus Passion, which became an international success.

Two years ago Platel opened the Holland Festival with C(H)ŒURS, a performance which featured 150 musicians of the Teatro Real and ten of his own dancers to examine the crushing tension between the individual and the force of the masses to the music of Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi. Coup Fatal is less grim. More than just a deconstruction or Africanisation of baroque, or an homage to this musical style, Coup Fatal is essentially an ode to the haughty elegance of the Congolese 'Sapeurs' – the dandies of Kinshasa in their colourful and extravagant dress. The unadulterated brilliance of these proud Sapeurs shines through in the performance's cocky, self-assured and baroque bombast. They suppress the gruesome history of war and violence with a love for opulence, exuberance and grand gestures, taking their commentary beyond irony. The musical direction is in the hands of the Brussels based composer Fabrizio Cassol (1964) together with the guitarist Rodriguez Vangama.

The initial push for staging Coup Fatal only took two weeks to establish as the musicians, under the direction of Vangama, gelled magnificently. The set was devised in collaboration with the artist Freddy Tsimba (1967), who rose to world fame with his contributions to various editions of the Dakar Biennial. Since 1998, Tsimba has expressed the harshness of war and the solidarity of the displaced, creating life sized, distressing sculptures of welded, recycled scrap materials, ranging from empty (i.e. used) cartridge cases to old knives and forks. Tsimba's work is a protest against war as well as a monument for human tragedies caused by war. His fragmented, expressive and provocative sculptures mirror universal human issues and their devastating outcomes.

In the space of a couple of years, the ensemble grew into a tight-knitted orchestra with the support of KVS and with Cassol as their musical adviser. Over the course of this process, the ensemble's performances became more dramatic and theatrical in character – a shift which has since been further built upon in collaboration with Platel, Guion and les ballets C de la B, Coup Fatal being the brilliant result.