Nkenguégi

The Congolese writer and director Dieudonné Niangouna (Brazzaville, 1976) is returning to the Holland Festival with a new performance, Nkenguégi. This is the last part of his trilogy La Trilogie des Vertiges (‘The Trilogy of Vertigo’), which also comprises Le Socle des Vertiges (2010)

(‘The Source of Vertigo’) and Shéda (Holland Festival, 2013). For Niangouna, art is 'an escape from suppression'. Theatre is his weapon. In his poetic, layered and highly linguistic plays, African and European story-telling traditions come together. The same is true of Nkenguégi. Niangouna exposes the failure of a political system, the oppression of a nation and the atrocious journey that refugees take each and every day across the Mediterranean in unseaworthy boats to reach the 'fortress of Europe.' At the same time, he asks the question as to whether the story of a refugee belongs in a theatre. He does that in his own way, through the use of virtuous, kaleidoscopic performing arts. 

In Nkenguégi, a group of actors work on a contemporary, theatrical version of the iconic painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818) by the French painter Théodore Géricault (1791-1824). This painting – a benchmark in the French Romantic Movement – refers to an historical event whereby, after the naval frigate Méduse ran aground off the coast of Mauritania in 1816, a group of survivors spent almost two weeks drifting around at sea. Of the 147 shipwrecked people, the majority died due to dehydration and starvation. Only fifteen survived, thanks to cannibalism. In Nkenguégi, this raft symbolises the immigration problem today. While the theatre group deals with this issue, other characters searching for things appear in associative, dream-like scenes. A girl searching for true love, a boy guarding the desert, a group of idealistic students who want to change the world, a traveller on board the Flying Dutchman, two Congolese immigrants who want to settle in France, a lonely man with plans to kill himself, and two goats that are forced to mate until they die.

The title refers to a thorny plant with dangerous, razor-sharp leaves that grows in the woods and savannahs around the equator. In Congo, herders use the Nkenguégi shrubs as a natural barrier to protect their livestock from predators. The Nkenguégi functions as protection and as a prison, and therefore embodies an impossible situation. Niangouna asks, 'What safety are we really guaranteed? Is it safety as a result of frameworks, barriers, laws, codes, warnings, orders, commands, requirements, conventions or decisions? What freedom do we have? The freedom to live in the house of the tyrant, so that we aren't eaten up by the neighbouring tyrant? Do we have the choice to be eaten up by a lion or a leopard? The predators are inside and outside. What is our alternative?' 

According to Niangouna, theatrical language must have three different qualities. It must be written, spoken and heard. In his work, he therefore combines classical French, the popular and poetic use of language of the great Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi, and the tribal language and oral story-telling traditions of the Lari people. The result is a new, enriched form of French. For Niangouna, the text is like the sculptor's chisel, which he uses to create a sculpture out of an amorphous lump of stone. In the performance, this text is projected as a film and propelled by the tom-tom rhythms of the music group Chikadora. The performance reflects the political confrontation between North and South, the political destruction of the future, and the generations that have been sacrificed for this. Nkenguégi is Niangouna's reflection on the state of the world: unsentimental, musical and driven by an unstoppable will to live.