I traveled from Kisangani to Kinshasa with Faustin and his family. It’s the 10^th Anniversary of the French Cultural Center (CCF) and Faustin has been invited to teach workshops and perform as part of the 4-day program of festivities. Over a period of three days, he will work with five men and one woman who will be incorporated into his performance.

They rehearse and perform in a covered outdoor space. The floor is cement, blanketed with construction dust and dirt from the outdoors. There are framed windows without glass and scattered debris all around the space. During rehearsals there is the noise of hammering and mowing and construction workers constantly walk through the space.

Faustin does not teach technique – he wants to impart a method of thinking about performance that the dancers can develop and use in other work. His focus is to imprint the notion of context, spatial awareness and purpose/intention of movement. He’s rigorous in his work with them and very tough but the artists know and respect him and are hungry to learn.

Faustin put together an hour- long performance consisting of excerpts of his work going back 10 years in honor of the CCF’s long support. He introduced the evening by quoting Pina Bausch who once said that dance didn’t really interest her. What interested her was why people dance. Faustin explained that with this performance, he was attempting to distill the why of his dance-making over the past 10 years.

Faustin transformed and revealed the space through the simple use of light from a projector which he manipulated to frame the action. The clearly articulated spatial relationships created between performers and between the performers and the space they occupied, provided context for the viewer and supported the emotional terrain of the piece. The movement vocabulary, created through a series of theme-based improvisations, was unique according to the capabilities of each performer– the woman was especially engaging in that her movement and presence was so different from the male dancers. They were all wonderful—comfortable in their skins and deeply committed to the extremely difficult work they were doing—and it was hard to imagine that all this had been accomplished in only three days. They rolled, dropped from window heights to the floor, cart-wheeled and repeatedly jumped on the hard and dirty cement floor. There wasn’t a single part of their bodies that wasn’t covered in dust and dirt and I can’t imagine any dancer I know in the U.S. consenting to work under these conditions, nor should they. For Congolese artists, there’s no choice in the matter and I couldn’t help but be moved by their courage.

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