Fagaala / Senegal
Dancer and choreographer Germaine Acogny has been a major creative force in her native country of Senegal and throughout the African continent for more than 30 years. Her works fuse traditional and modern African dance forms. This new work new work is about the genocide in Rwanda, created in collaboration with Japanese choreographer Kota Yamazaki.
It is an act of madness to want to murder an entire race. The trauma of the Rwandan genocide is still a fresh wound, and the dance piece Fagaala explores some of their stories.It is more poetic than brutal, yet the piece captures both the horrifying implications of genocide and the sadness of personal tragedy.
All the performers are male, however they manage to tell stories about murdered babies and raped women. In some ways, the absence of females in this portrayal avoids any clichéd representations and instead highlights the sheer horror of the situation.
Other confronting topics, such as murder, self-mutilation, masturbation and torture are also told abstractly, what one of the choreographers, Germaine Acogny, describes as an “exorcism” for the people who have lived through it. Through music and movement, this highly physical performance captures what language alone cannot.
You can feel the insanity seeping in, through the chaotic bodily jerks and the sounds of sharpening metal against ominous drumming. The flapping of the hands and arms is like a trapped bird trying to escape – and you, the audience, are saddened to know that the trapped bird will only be able to escape through death.
The dance is a combination of the frenetic African and the slower, more poignant Japanese butoh style. The sounds of cicadas, winds and windchimes are a constant backdrop to the piece, creating an eerie atmosphere of things to come. It represents both the peacefulness that existed before the genocide as well as the stillness of death afterwards.
Although the set is simple, it is highly effective. Red and white cloths are draped around the stage, which later in the performance are colours that the performers themselves wear. Representing purity, death, madness and war, they are also colours of an African goddess. For a few moments there is a magical blue, fairy like atmosphere created by the lighting and sound. The serenity is quickly lost, however, only replaced by the darkness once more.
Germaine explains that the idea for this dance piece came from two books dealing with slavery and genocide, Murambi, le livre des ossements and Dans le nu de la vie. It led her to think, Could I be a murderer too? After watching Fagaala, you’ll be glad to never need to know the answer, if the same question were asked of you. For us, genocide is a hypothetical situation, rather than a stark, brutal reality.
