Talent alone won't get you there. You also need a bit of luck. That luck happened to Alain Platel so often by now that you almost start to doubt your own wickedness. Still. Those who not only count a composer like Fabrizio Cassol among their friends, but who also gave singing prodigy Serge Kakudji a chance, deserve a bit of luck. What the trio has now achieved with 13 musicians from Kinshasa is downright revolutionary. And a death knell for those who believe that north and south can never really meet. I experienced it on Monday, 16 June. And it still echoes.
So is Coup Fatal (French for 'death blow'). That project Alain Platel can now put his name to. His company Les Ballets C de la B is still called the same, but none of his regular dancers participate. Here, a full band is on stage, blowing retesting African rhythms into the hall. And all to melody lines derived from the Baroque. Monteverdi cum suis. Bach. That sort of thing.
Further, two worlds could not be apart, but so that turns out to be untrue. That's down to Fabrizio Cassol, who in 2009 managed to adapt Bach's Matthaeus Passion for accordion and Aka Moon, and did it so well that it seemed perfectly natural. In that performance was centred on a discovery. A discovery so fragile we didn't even dare mention him: Serge Kakudji. In Pitié, this Congolese boy sang the role of Jesus as a countertenor and that was enough to convince everyone that Jesus had always been an African. I still get hot and cold at the same time when I think back to that performance.
In Coup Fatal, Kakudji, now world-famous, is the big man of the ensemble composed of singers and dancers from Kinshasa, Congo's capital. Between beaded curtains of bullet casings from the last civil war, they play the stars from heaven. Cassol has merged baroque and rhythms in such a way that you suddenly understand completely why that music also moved people five hundred years ago. Platel has then doused the dance movements that the musicians already had of themselves with a sauce of C de la B, making the encounter completely reciprocal: Western baroque performed as African dance music, leading to dance in which we recognise modern European dance.
Platel has no political message. Says he. The musicians just want to make music. They say. The result is a sledgehammer blow to the mugshot of anyone who thinks our cultures will never be able to live together.
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