Illumination via imagination

Faustin Linyekula and his company, Les Studios Kabako, have made a miracle. From a harrowing cultural history of slavery, colonization and -- more recently -- decades of corruption, poverty and murder under a series of despotic rulers, the Congolese choreographer and his performers have fashioned "Festival of Lies."

The two-hour work is a palimpsest of memory, propaganda and imagination, with a despairing humanity at its core. Yet the performers deliver the work without pretense, anger or righteousness. Their primary concern is the search for truth. And their truth -- symbolized by long, industrial fluorescent lights -- is buried within a pitch-perfect blend of movement, storytelling, music, and projected and recorded text from speeches by Patrice Lamumba, Mobutu Sese Seko and Joseph Kabila.

Throughout the work, the performers continually rearrange the lights on the floor, as a means of establishing order amid the chaos. But they also use their bodies -- as their leaders have sacrificed the Congolese people -- to obscure the truth. The sturdy Papy Ebotani and charismatic Djodjo Kazadi drape themselves over or pile onto the lights, arms and legs askew.

The men dance within a hexagonal frame of lights, Linyekula's painfully thin body rippling and pulsing as if it were its own means of liberation. With torsos bent over, they climb over lights like rungs on a ladder of a slave ship. Ebotani lies within a frame of barely flickering lights, as Kazadi watches hopelessly over him.

Meanwhile, Marie-Louise Bibish Mumbu asks, "Is this African modern dance?" as the men twist into a milling mass around her. Yes. But "Festival of Lies" is also more. It's a performance that cajoles within the corruption, as when Linyekula breaks from a dramatic dance vignette to insist that the audience get up and buy food and drinks, as "Africans always need money, and here's a way to do it without feeling guilty."

It's a performance with an overwhelming sense of resignation, but still has Linyekula, his body jerking and flailing, longing "to fly away." Mumbu poignantly muses on her desire "for a spare life." The company asks the audience to stand and sing the national anthem, then convenes Congo's dead leaders over a table of broken-up white baby dolls to decide what the lyrics might be.

"We are the fruit of our own imagination," Linyekula says early on. By the end of "Festival of Lies," audience and performers are together dancing to a live band led by Minneapolis musician Yawo Attivor. In that moment, all of our lives are better for it.

Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities dance critic.