Les Bérénice de Faustin Linyekula : approche interculturelle et historicité plurielle du répertoire classique

Abstract

Does the staging of a French neoclassical play necessarily reactivate dominant values, serving only a patrimonial tradition, or might it also occasion a critique of cultural hierarchies and the theatrical canon? This question runs through the two productions that Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula devoted to Bérénice in 2009-2010. In his staging at the Studio-Théâtre, the transcultural and transgendered casting lead to see this tragedy of expulsion and succession through the dual lens of the performance tradition of the Comédie-Française and the violence of colonial history. The following year at the Festival d’Avignon, Linyekula presented an intercultural adaptation, Pour en finir avec Bérénice, which questioned the role of teaching French neoclassical theater within the context colonial linguistic domination, as well as the troubled relationship of colonized subjects to their identity and their heritage. By making bodies “dance” and “scream” in Bérénice, which has long been considered the epitome of the French neoclassicism, Linyekula upends the enduring myth of Racine’s theater as one of language alone. But above all, he turns the play’s subject into an opportunity for militant reflection: the plural historicity of his productions serves to unearth what official historiography has erased, interrogate the dialectic of belonging and foreignness in postcolonial identity, and question the status of classical repertoire as a universal cultural object.

Keywords

• Bérénice
• Racine
• tragedy
• Faustin Linyekula
• repertoire
• dramatic canon