Born in 1976, Dieudonné Niangouna is an actor, author and stage director as well as director of the Mantsina Theatre International Stage Festival in Brazzaville, his hometown. It was in the 1990s, a period of continuing civil wars in the Republic of Congo, that he worked successively with the Salaka Company, the Deso Company, and the African Arts Theatre, before creating a company with his brother Criss, called Les Bruits de la Rue (The Noises of the Street) in 1997.
A renowned actor, he reveals himself to be a versatile author whose plays are performed just as well in Brazzaville or in France. He alternates plays more conventionally structured with writing around dialogue with a more explosive and subversive style, nourished by Sony Labou Tansi's poetic language, such as Attitude Clando and My Name Is. He only writes to reach out to his contemporaries, with immediacy and urgency, in his country and anywhere in the world, where he is welcomed in theatres or outside them, unhampered by borders, jumping over manmade barriers.
At the centre of this long monologue, the Congolese playwright Dieudonné Niangouna places the wanderings of a man constantly confronted with the notion of frontiers, but who doesn't understand the will to shut in and isolate that pervades the western world. However, he is not an archetype that denounces the horrors of living permanently underground with the fear of being uncovered. It is a free man who speaks, thinks and reacts. He is an individual marked by his past, with his scars, speaking out to us in an original, inventive, subversive, chaotic street language: in spoken images. Inside the four white walls with barbed wire, that could symbolise a hospital or any other place of internment, he talks, questions and dreams, sometimes agitated, sad, in love or euphoric. He tries at all costs to find once more the man he was before becoming a tracked animal. Reality is shattered, reconstructed through a succession of thoughts that come to mind according to journeys past, those imposed and the free choices, the people who punctuated his solitude. Refusing fear, refusing to be classified or labelled, refusing membership to a group, he defends anonymity and the freedom of choice.
Dieudonné Niangouna knows how to use farce, the burlesque and caricature to bring out what is hidden deep within his hero, a hero who refuses heroism, and who touches the tragic through his incessant search for freedom. Recreating in his imagination all the places of his choppy life, the anonymous “Clando” takes us on a trip, not allowing pity and misery to creep in, just asking for the right to live freely on this Earth that no-one should have the right to take over.
Distribution
auteur, metteur en scène, comédien: Dieudonné Niangouna
assistant et régie lumière: Brunel Makoumbou
administration: Audifax Moumpossa
Production
coproduction: Les Bruits de la rue (Brazzaville), Festival d'Avignon
avec le soutien :des Francophonies en Limousin, de l'Ambassade de France
à Brazzaville et de CulturesFrance dans le cadre du programme Afrique en créations