Festival of Lies

When: Nov. 1–3
Where: Cedar Cultural Center, 416 Cedar Ave. S., Mpls., 612-375-7600

You’re at a party. Everyone is eating and drinking. Some friends play music and start to dance. As the evening wears on, though, the storytelling begins. It’s a hard time in your community, and everyone needs to talk and to listen. Some stories are funny; some are beautiful. Some stories are hard to listen to—they retell awful things that have happened to you, horrible things you’ve done to each other. But the storytelling itself is redemptive. With your history reclaimed, you can start again.

Replace storytelling with modern dance, and you have the premise of Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula’s “Festival of Lies,” presented this November by the Walker Art Center and performed at the Cedar Cultural Center. Amid food, drink, and live local African music, Linyekula and his company evoke Congo’s rough past and present. Most Minnesotans have known nothing like Congo’s years of violence and corruption. “Today it’s a pile of ruins,” Linyekula says of his country. Of course, some Minnesotans also have hard histories. Walker performing arts curator Philip Bither points out that a “work that brings diverse African immigrant, dance, and world music audiences together in a single experience” could be important for the Twin Cities right now. Whatever our backgrounds, Linyekula believes that all our histories share a common root. “We meet as human beings with various experiences,” he says. “If you really dig deep, underground, it’s the same source.”

That human connection arises from an unusual setup: performance as party. The final performance, on November 3, will take the connection further. That night the show will begin at 8:00 p.m., but it won’t end until around 2 a.m. Six hours might seem long, but that’s the point. Linyekula wants to immerse the audience in a personal and real experience, with fun and tragedy mixed together, not just give them a show to watch. “Faustin is interested in shaking up how theatrical dance performance is typically experienced,” says Bither. Audience members are encouraged to come and go as they please—the dance is continuous, the audience fluid.

“African identity is not a fixed point,” Linyekula says. He hopes that “once we’ve exhausted all the stereotypes, we can begin to look at Africa and we can begin to talk.”