Open Daily 9:30–6:00, Monday Until 8:00
LUFU LULOBA – The Death of Silence is a stage production for three performers—two dancers and an actress—inspired by the youth of Katanga and the social, cultural, and historical transformations taking place in Lubumbashi. The work explores a generation growing up with stories, values, knowledge, and representations passed down by those who came before them. It also examines what has been erased, displaced, or imposed in the construction of these narratives, particularly through the legacies of colonization and the types of domination that have shaped ways of thinking about, telling stories about, and representing Africa.
From this perspective, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe’s reflections on the construction of knowledge about Africa offer one of the project’s intellectual frameworks. The point is not to reconstruct a lost origin, but to search for what remains in the body when certain histories have been interrupted, transformed, or excluded from dominant narratives. The body thereby becomes a space of memory and transmission, but also a place where these legacies can be shifted and reinvented.
The choreographic research therefore starts from the origin of movement: the breath, walking, falling, movement, the transformation of the body, and the gestures that precede even language.
Inspired by a ritualistic approach and the figure of Thanatos, the dance explores states of disappearance, transition, and metamorphosis. The body passes through different states, as if sifting through a buried memory to bring forth ancient forms that continue to live on in the present. The dance then becomes a way of questioning what is transmitted to the body even before it’s articulated in speech.
Through the encounter between the two dancers and the actress, movement, voice, silence, and presence construct a space where individual memory and collective memory come face to face. LUFU LULOBA – The Death of Silence draws on a reality set in Lubumbashi but seeks to bring to light a more universal experience: a generation striving to rediscover its own voice, reexamine the narratives that have shaped it, and transform the legacies it carries. So if silence dies, what is reborn?
Liens
https://www.instagram.com/p/DNd0ds2tq1H/
