A tree with vermillion-coloured flowers is at the heart of Dorothée Munyaneza’s new work. Its name is umuko, traditionally considered a healer and keeper of stories, a symbol of the resilient ties between past, present, and future, and also a memory from Munyaneza’s childhood. Together with five young Rwandese dancers, musicians, and poets, the multidisciplinary artist celebrates the creativity, audacity, and freedom of a new generation: people who carry forward the memory of a common heritage while dreaming about the future and resisting the omnipresent danger of annihilation. “umuko” is a work of joy, love, and solidarity.
www.ciekadidi.com

Dorothée Munyaneza is a multi-disciplinary artist using music, song, text and movement to deal with rupture as a dynamic force. Munyaneza draws from real stories seizing body, memory and our times to create a space of resonance.
Her artistic research draws from the diversity of her cultural heritage – her extended family in Rwanda, the experience of the 14 years spent in London, her move to Paris followed by her settling in Marseille –, but more so by her appetite for encounters. Munyaneza sings since her childhood, trains at the Jonas Foundation in London, studies music and social sciences in Canterbury. She collaborated e.g. with François Verret, Radouan Mriziga, Ko Murobushi and many more. In 2013, Munyaneza founds the Kadidi company. In 2020 Dorothée Munyaneza translates “Hopelessly Devoted” by Kae Tempest. It will be staged in Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in fall 2024.

Artist’s Note by Dorothée Munyaneza
“It’s been 30 years since I moved away from my native land. 30 years that I live in new lands.
30 years that I root myself elsewhere.
First, London, then Paris and today Marseille.
30 years that I haven’t forgotten umuko, that tree that illuminates my childhood. That tree that resonates only in the native language. That bright red tree, earth red, which links me to what begins, to what is lost and found again, when I return, to what continues…
Leave.
Come back.
Each return to Rwanda is like resuming a conversation with those who make the artistic scene today, the young generation whose creativity, audacity and stubborn quest for emancipation I admire in the precariousness of everyday life and the fragility of it.
Leave.
Come back.
Return at the foot of umuko.
Now is the time to work with young artists in Rwanda. This is the time to find the home-tree, where we go to regain strength along the winding and rich paths of the creative process.
The time of umuko is here. „
Dorothée Munyaneza

[Source: tanzimaugust.de]

TFB Nr. 1905