“I tremble in my volcanic body”*

On the left side of the stage, instruments – guitars, percussion – amplifiers and microphones seem to be waiting for the band to arrive. A soft, pleasant, lounge-like light bathes the entire room. Four performers arrive, Soa, Audrey, Constant whistling, and Joel – at once composer, musician and performer in the show – playing the ukulele. They wander onto the stage. They lay round pieces of heavy cloth pierced in the center on the ground – so that later, a body can wear them – as if for a picnic. Two of them sit down, the others walk around, talking and conversing with each other or on the phone, in Malagasy and English. Words are repeated by each of the performers, sometimes layered, like a tuilage. Live sounds of cymbals and electric guitar intertwine. The atmosphere, for the moment, is cheerful and light. A prologue in the form of a smooth polyglot idyll – which is dispelled when the frame of neon lights arranged on the floor lights up and, suddenly, ostensibly encloses the bodies.

It’s roll call. “J’appelle Haiti!” Audrey bows. “J’appelle Madagascar!” Soa bows. “J’appelle Rwanda!” Constant bows. The performers then raise their hands one by one, at the call of the corresponding colonizer nations and the recall of the “immigrant generation” to which they “belong”. Playing with school or military protocols, theatrical or reverence gestures, and a Brechtian distancing effect, this sequence highlights the singularity of each performer at the crossroads of different histories of colonization, dispossession, migration, and dispersion, and situates the group piece as an eminently political space between deconstruction, reclaiming, and creolization.

The piece has already begun, but darkness suddenly descends upon the audience, and the piece starts again. The electric guitar plays sounds that morph from minuets to Jazz, Funk, Caribbean rhythms, Afrobeat, and finally experimental riffs – as if weaving a huge syncretic braid that crosses the entire space. The progressive melodic and rhythmic metamorphosis is also a metamorphosis of timbres – at times mellow, then dark, nasal, brassy, airy. Accessorized with long white satin gloves and hybrid costumes, the performers dance in pairs or threes, very tight, in unison or symmetrically, perfectly attuned to each other. Their precision is impressive. They follow imaginary winding lines – like in French baroque gardens, then straight lines – like in parades. Their movements echo and estrange military marching, the strolling in aristocratic courts, the playing in a maze, the posing of officials, the spinning in Tromba rituals, the dancing in a club. The movements take us on a journey across different times, bridging distant geographies inextricably linked to each other by modern colonial brutality, by contemporary migrations, by invented, inherited, and blended cultural expressions – they too being intricately tied to each other.

The movements accelerate and begin to disintegrate to the increasingly experimental sounds. Then, the bodies cluster on the floor around the instruments. They move slowly, are sometimes seized by spasms, and eat marshmallows. They form a choir – a little childish, a little muffled, a little haunted. The bittersweet text borrows from advertising, fairy tales, and concrete poetry, evoking a trademarked imagined product called Ignoral, the “ideal solution” and “passionate response.” “I’m in pain, I eat Ignoral.” Ignoring, not knowing, preferring not to know, forgetting: these notions are at the core of the piece.

The idyll from the beginning – was it one after all? – is no more. Now the piece tackles imperialist languages, their insinuation into bodies and rituals, into spaces and territories, into histories and traditions. It tackles their participation in cultural erasure, in assimilation policies, in the shaping of imposed identities, in the subjugation of experiences and affects. French – and later English in the piece – are summoned, with different scansions, across different forms – advertising slogans, puns, street names, tongue twisters. These are crafted and mobilized to take on polysemy. Their implicit meanings reveal the ideological violence contained in some – apparently harmless – expressions and phrases especially in the light of colonialism and extractivism. “Que c’est crevant de voir crever une crevette sur la cravate d’un homme crevé dans une crevasse” (“How exhausting it is to see a shrimp die on the tie of a man who died in a crevasse.”) “Give papa a cup of proper coffee in a copper coffee cup.” “I was born a loser.” These phrases are pronounced, articulated, repeated, or rejected – linguistic bifurcations and alternatives to the tyranny of hegemonic languages appear.

The piece features moments of dispersion and dissociation but lingers on collective resolution, communion, and commemoration. It shows how unbearable loneliness, depression, and disempowerment can be countered and reversed with and through music, dance, and language. Storytelling, knowledge transfer and healing are conveyed by language – in the mother tongue, in the language of ancestors, in the language of friendship. Joel tells the tale of the crocodiles in Malagasy. Audrey, with her back to us, dances and speaks in Creole. Later we realize that her voice is pre-recorded. She talks to herself. First a murmur, her speech becomes a mantra that gradually amplifies. She dances for herself, so as not to forget (herself), also maybe, as catharsis. Then she dances for Soa and Constant. The performers take turns as guides, as MCs, using claps and “heys” as cues – as in a dance battle – and whistles too – as in the streets of Minneapolis to announce an imminent strike by ICE. The performers pay attention to each other. They look at each other, talk to each other. They imitate, repeat, and learn from each other.

The four artists, children of the diaspora, are linked by the haunting afterlife of colonialism. But first and foremost, they are linked on stage by their complicity and the joy of being together, by their common love for dance and music, and by their shared need to find – through and beyond words – embodied languages that at once express the gaps in history, the holes in languages, and celebrate resistance, resilience, exchange – past, present and future. The poetic and alliterative title fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna – which means comparison, transmission, and rivalry in Malagasy – places the piece under these three modes of relationality which, depending on the context in which they are performed, can be impeaching or driving forces. The performers have chosen their bright and poly/tical side.

“When I dance, I forgive myself. I don’t translate. I speak an invented Malagasy language. [...] All my rage without phonetics, without reverence, without apology.”*

Anne Faucheret works as a contemporary art historian, curator, writer and university lecturer. She currently holds a position as Senior Scientist in the department of Artistic Stategies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She regularly contributes to contemporary art magazines and artistic publications, as well as to juries in visual and performing arts. She is interested in how artistic practices open spaces and stories to challenge inherited regimes of separation and domination, and to experience other ways of living and working together.

*The opening and closing quotes were taken from Soa Ratsifandrihana’s podcast Rouge Cratère.