Toi, moi, Tituba...

“As always, everything starts from encounters, encounter with Elsa Dorlin, the philosopher, encounter with her text Me, you, us: I, Tituba and the Ontology of the Trace that I enjoyed setting to movement in 2021 as part of L’ADN Dance Living Lab at the National Theatre of Chaillot, and then the reunion with Tituba and Maryse Condé’s line of thought.

A story-genealogy, published in 1986, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem gave life, from a few lines discovered in the minutes of a trial for witchcraft, to Tituba, woman, black and witch, at a time when it was not right to be either of them. A work-resistance, that of Maryse Condé, who has never ceased to give back a voice, a flesh, a story to what has been erased, silenced and bruised.

Everything is there. How to resonate the breaths, lives and dreams of those men and those women whose identities and very existences were denied and crushed by the slave trade and the colonial system? Through words? Through the body, perhaps, since I am a dancer? Through the voice that inhabits space, songs that speak to those who are there and those who are far away? How to move my body and my story so as to make audible, visible and palpable the traces of those extinguished, gone unnoticed, ignored or forgotten, how to relate to my own history which no written trace testifies, except perhaps for a few “historical erasures” to use Elsa Dorlin’s words in the colonial administrative archives? Is it possible to make lineage, to relate for the time a dance lasts, those that history has forgotten with so much application, with our lives, but also with those who are yet to be born?”

Dorothée Munyaneza

Starting from a body-archive capable of collecting and honouring memories, Dorothée Munyaneza builds with composer Khyam Allami a living, sensitive, physical and corporeal archive. She brings together experiences born of the very dispersion. She turns her body into a fragment and a whole. A body that excavates a past made up of suffering and pain to celebrate, repair and commemorate. A standing body as as an attempt to prevent oblivion and erasure from taking precedence.