Not Another Diva ...

Based on a song cycle written by Hlengiwe Lushaba, this production is about an ancient line of female power – wisdom passed on from generation to generation. Together with Johanna Tshabalala

(dance), Franck Moka (electronics and vocals), Huguette Tolinga (percussion and vocals), Pati Basima (bass), Zing Kapaya (guitar) and Heru Shabaka-Ra (trumpet) Lushaba takes the audience with her in a breath-taking theatrical concert. Her impressive stage presence and voice merge with the energetic sounds of the Congolese ndombolo and rumba. 

An earlier contribution of Faustin Linyekula to the Holland Festival, in 2012, was La création du monde (1923-2012) – a pointed African commentary on the modernist ‘negro-cubist’ ballet with the same name from 1923. That was also the year in which Linyekula and Lushaba started working together and they created the performance What is Black Music Anyway / Self Portraits for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

The idea for Not Another Diva… was born when Lushaba wanted to record an album of songs at Linyekula’s Studios Kabako. He thought of turning them into a theatre production. This led to a discussion about the cultural role of the diva and how we often see them as tragic. Women who expend all their energy on the spotlight and the public, sacrificing their family life or even their actual lives for fame. One example being the famous South African singer Miriam Makeba who, after a lifetime of activism in the struggle for Apartheid, quite literally died on stage.

Not Another Diva… presents a diva who knows her roots, keeps a hold on reality and stays in contact with her family and everyday life. Not Another Diva… brings the female power of the diva back to the back yard, the place where ordinary people live, stories are told and the washing is hung out to dry. A place of reconciliation, far away from the spotlight. Being a diva in Africa isn’t easy, Linyekula explains: ‘Our society prefers submissive women. It takes a lot of power to step up, to occupy that space and to be a leader’. The three women in Not Another Diva... are mountain movers, Linyakula says. ‘They’re so powerful that the four male performers who surround them don’t take away their energy. This performance is a sort of celebration of these women’s power, an ode to the knowledge that being powerful isn’t contradictory to being beautiful. Art cannot change a whole society, but it can change individuals and that’s the first part.’